: any of a suborder (Ankylosauria) of herbivorous Cretaceous ornithiscian dinosaurs having a long low-lying thickset body covered dorsally with bony plates
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebLate last year paleontologists named an early ankylosaur, Spicomellus afer, from the roughly 165-million-year-old rock of Morocco. Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 31 May 2022 Stegouros elengassen, described this year from bones found in the 72-to-75-million-year-old rock of Chile, was an ankylosaur with a fern-like splash of bones at the end of its tail. Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 27 Dec. 2021 Fossils finds elsewhere revealed the earliest ankylosaur from Africa, a Chinese sauropod and the oldest carnivorous dinosaur to be found in the UK. Ashley Strickland, CNN, 29 Dec. 2021 However, the jawbones confirmed that the skeleton did in fact belong to an ankylosaur, New Scientist reports. Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Dec. 2021 Ankylosaurus magniventris is an ankylosaur—a suborder of four-legged, armored, and mostly herbivorous dinosaurs—but not all ankylosaurs were Ankylosaurus. Amy Mckeever, National Geographic, 22 Sep. 2020 In life, the dinosaur — a type of ankylosaur — weighed more than a ton. Ashley Strickland, CNN, 2 June 2020 In a separate project, for example, researchers unearthed a new species of ankylosaur, or armored dinosaur, in the Beehive State.Fox News, 27 Jan. 2020 In related work, New York Institute of Technology paleontologist Jason Bourke found in 2018 that a group of armored dinosaurs called ankylosaurs may have had large, convoluted nasal passages filled with blood vessels. John Pickrell, National Geographic, 4 Sep. 2019 See More
Word History
Etymology
borrowed from New Latin ankylosaur-, base of the taxa Ankylosaurusankylosaurus, Ankylosauridae (from Anykylosaurus + -idae-idae), and Ankylosauria (from Ankylosaurus + -ia-ia entry 2)