Stegosaur

Stegosaurs were plant eaters, but they were far from the passive victims of predatory dinosaurs. Scientists have recently uncovered fossil evidence of one allosaur who got too close to a stegosaur’s unusually flexible spiked tail and didn’t live to regret it. At least not long. The scientists say the stegosaur’s tail made a tell-tale conical wound near the allosaur’s pubis bone, causing an infection that probably killed the predator. “A massive infection ate away a baseball-sized sector of the bone,” said Houston Museum of Natural Science paleontologist Robert Bakker.  “Probably this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here, the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs.” The wound is similar to the type of goring wound large herbivores such as longhorn cattle inflict today, although of course coming from the other end of the animal. Scientists think the stegosaur had a tail that was unusually agile  for a dinosaur. “They have no locking joints, even in the tail,” Bakker explained. “Most dinosaur tails get stiffer towards the