By Aleksandra Michalska
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The American Museum of Natural History revealed the identification of its newest resident on Thursday – “Apex,” one of the full specimens ever found of the plant-eating dinosaur Stegosaurus, recognized for the upright plates on its again and a spiky tail.
To excited gasps from an viewers of college youngsters, the museum pulled again a beige curtain to disclose the 11-foot (3.4-meter) tall, 20-foot (6-meter) lengthy skeleton of the Jurassic Period dinosaur.
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“People are actually enthusiastic about this fossil as a result of Stegosaurus is an iconic dinosaur,” mentioned the museum’s dinosaur curator Roger Benson.
Stegosaurus walked on 4 legs and lived in North America round 150 million years in the past through the Jurassic Period. Its fossils had been first found within the 1870s.
“Although it was a herbivore, Stegosaurus wasn’t like a cow or a sheep,” Benson mentioned. “It’s a herbivore that might take care of itself. It has these depraved spikes on its tail. It has plates alongside its again.”
Those would have been helpful as safety in opposition to meat-eating dinosaurs like Allosaurus.
This Stegosaurus fossil was present in Colorado and fetched a report $44.6 million at a Sotheby’s public sale in July. The purchaser has loaned it to the New York museum, one of many main pure historical past museums within the United States.
“Everyone has their very own favourite dinosaur, however Stegosaurus is up there within the prime 5. So it is exhausting to not get excited a few actually full, massive particular person of this animal,” Benson mentioned.
(Reporting by Aleksandra Michalska; Writing by Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by Will Dunham)
