Episode 395: Why Ankylosaurus is the best dinosaur. Ankylosaurus is the longest, heaviest, and widest ankylosaur. But those aren’t the only details that make Ankylosaurus such a special dinosaur.

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Ankylosaurus is the longest, heaviest, and widest ankylosaur. But those aren’t the only details that make Ankylosaurus such a special dinosaur.

Some of the papers we cover that we didn’t discuss back in Episode 5:

• Original paper describing Ankylosaurus & Ankylosauridae by Barnum Brown from 1908 source
• How ankylosaurid tails evolved by Arbour & Currie source
• Ankylosaurid tail posture, club sizes, and uses by Coombs (including the shin bashing & head butting hypotheses) source
• Redescription of Ankylosaurus by Arbour & Mallon with its overall tank-like proportions source

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The dinosaur of the day: Aegyptosaurus

• Titanosaur sauropod that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Egypt (Bahariya Formation)
• Looked like other sauropods, with columnar legs (walked on four legs), a long tail, and a long, thick neck with a small head
• Estimated to be 49 ft (15 m) long and weigh 7 tonnes
• Tail may have helped as a counterweight for its body
• Type species is Aegyptosaurus baharijensis
• Genus name means “Egypt’s lizard”
• Named in 1932 by Ernst Stromer
• Holotype included three caudal vertebrae, a partial scapula, and some limb bones
• Fossils have also been found in other locations in the Sahara Desert
• Fossils were stored in Munich, but destroyed in 1944, during WWII
• Fragments still exist, mostly from indeterminate specimens from Niger
• One of the dinosaurs featured in the documentary Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt
• Other animals that lived around the same time and place include the sauropods Dicraeosaurus and Paralititan, theropods including Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Bahariasaurus, Elaphrosaurus, and Sigilmassaurus, crocodyliforms, plesiosaurs, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks

Fun Fact:

Correction from Episode 5: Ankylosaurs probably couldn’t use their osteoderms to blush since they were probably covered in keratin and not skin.

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