Stegouros

What it was like

Stegouros was a small armored plant eater with one of the strangest tails of any dinosaur. Instead of a round club or a pair of spikes, the end of its tail was flattened into a broad, frond-shaped weapon made of fused bony plates, edged like a war club.

Its skeleton is nearly complete, which is rare for an armored dinosaur from the southern continents. It belongs to Parankylosauria, a group of small ankylosaurs from the old southern landmass of Gondwana, alongside Antarctopelta from Antarctica and Kunbarrasaurus from Australia.

Its world

It lived in the Late Cretaceous, sometime between about 84 and 66 million years ago, in what is now southern Chile. Its bones come from the Dorotea Formation, which has also produced the duck-billed plant eater Gonkoken.

How it was found

Soto-Acuña and colleagues named Stegouros in 2021, from a single partial skeleton. Its odd tail helped show that the armored dinosaurs of the far south followed their own path, separate from the club-tailed ankylosaurs of the north.