A “DRAGON OF THE PRIME.”

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 6, 5 December 1932, Page 2

A “DRAGON OF THE PRIME.”

NODOSAURUS SKELETON FOUND IN MONTANA. The American Museum of Natural History announces the discovery by Mr Barnum Brown, curator of fossil reptiles, of a nearly complete skeleton of a Nodosaurus. The only other relics of the Nodosaurus ever discovered were a small number of bony plates found over 40 years ago by Professor O. C. Marsh, of A T ale University. Until that time it was not known that such an animal had existed. The skeleton, which was found this summer in a lower cretaceous formation 30 miles south of Billings, Montana, is complete, except for a part of the skull. Though the animal was related to the Dinosaurus family, it was far shorter and wider than any of the Dinosaurs. The specimen is only 14ft. long and it is 7ft. in breadth at the hips. It had hea.vy plates of scale-like pattern to give flexibility. The age of the skeleton is approximately 100,000,000 years.

The Nodosaurus was discovered by Professor Marsh in 1889. It was found in rocks about the same age as English chalk. Ono of the best-known forms alive is Stegosaurus, which has a ridge of great triangular plates round the back and is about 25ft. long by 12ft. broad at the hips. Probably the Nodosaurus was not unlike the Scolosaurus, which was found in tho cretaceous beds of Alberta just before the AA’ar, and is now mounted in the fossil reptile gallery in tho Natural Historv Museum. In that animal tho whole back is covered with thorny plates with smaller plates in botween to allow for flexibility. Those creaturos wore vegetable feeders, and the armour protected them against the flesh-eating Dinosaurus, which were their contemporaries. They also aided in their defence by a spiked tu.iL like a giant's club.