page_title: Stegosauria
section_title: Evolutionary history
hierarchical_section_title: Stegosauria / Evolutionary history
caption_attribution_description: Huayangosaurus taibaii, a stegosaur from the Middle Jurassic of China, pencil drawing
context_page_description: Stegosauria is a group of herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs that lived during the Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. Stegosaurian fossils have been found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, predominantly in what is now North America, Europe, Africa, South America and Asia. Their geographical origins are unclear; the earliest unequivocal stegosaurian, Huayangosaurus taibaii, lived in China.
  Stegosaurians were armored dinosaurs. Originally, they did not differ much from more primitive members of that group, being small, low-slung, running animals protected by armored scutes. An early evolutionary innovation was the development of tail spikes, or "thagomizers", as defensive weapons. Later species, belonging to a subgroup called the Stegosauridae, became larger, and developed long hindlimbs that no longer allowed them to run. This increased the importance of active defence by the thagomizer, which could ward off even large predators because the tail was in a higher position, pointing horizontally to the rear from the broad pelvis. Stegosaurids had complex arrays of spikes and plates running along their backs, hips and tails.
context_section_description: Like the spikes and shields of ankylosaurs, the bony plates and spines of stegosaurians evolved from the low-keeled osteoderms characteristic of basal thyreophorans. One such described genus, Scelidosaurus, is proposed to be morphologically close to the last common ancestor of the clade uniting stegosaurians and ankylosaurians, the Eurypoda. Galton (2019) interpreted plates of an armored dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic (Sinemurian-Pliensbachian) Lower Kota Formation of India as fossils of a member of Ankylosauria; the author argued that this finding indicates a probable early Early Jurassic origin for both Ankylosauria and its sister group Stegosauria. Footprints attributed to the ichnotaxon Deltapodus brodricki from the Middle Jurassic (Aalenian) of England represent the oldest probable record of stegosaurians reported so far. Outside that, there are assigned fossils to stegosauria from the Toarcian: the specimen "IVPP V.219", a chimaera with bones of the sauropod Sanpasaurus is known from the Maanshan Member of the Ziliujing Formation. The perhaps most basal known stegosaurian, the four-metre-long Huayangosaurus, is still close to Scelidosaurus in build, with a higher and shorter skull, a short neck, a low torso, long slender forelimbs, short hindlimbs, large condyles on the thighbone, a narrow pelvis, long ischial and pubic shafts, and a relatively long tail. Its small tail club might be a eurypodan synapomorphy. Huayangosaurus lived during the Bathonian stage of the Middle Jurassic, about 166 million years ago.
  A few million years later, during the Callovian-Oxfordian, from China much larger species are known, with long, "graviportal" (adapted for moving only in a slow manner on land due to a high body weight) hindlimbs: Chungkingosaurus, Chialingosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus and Gigantspinosaurus. Most of these are considered members of the derived Stegosauridae. Lexovisaurus and Loricatosaurus, stegosaurid finds from England and France of approximately equivalent age to the Chinese specimens, are likely the same taxon. During the Late Jurassic, stegosaurids seem to have experienced their greatest radiation. In Europe, Dacentrurus and the closely related Miragaia were present. While older finds had been limited to the northern continents, in this phase Gondwana was colonised also as shown by Kentrosaurus living in Africa. No unequivocal stegosaurian fossils have been reported from South-America, India, Madagascar, Australia, or Antarctica, though. A Late Jurassic Chinese stegosaurian is Jiangjunosaurus. The most derived Jurassic stegosaurians are known from North-America: Stegosaurus (perhaps several species thereof) and the somewhat older Hesperosaurus. Stegosaurus was quite large (some specimens indicate a length of at least seven metres), had high plates, no shoulder spine, and a short, deep rump.
  From the Early Cretaceous, far fewer finds are known and it seems that the group had declined in diversity. Some fragmentary fossils have been described, such as Craterosaurus from England and Paranthodon from South Africa. The only more substantial discoveries are those of Wuerhosaurus, the exact age of which is highly uncertain. In the autumn of 2016, the teeth and tail spikes of stegosaurs were found in a Russian ravine that was once part of an Early Cretaceous river. The remains of these stegosaurs and other dinosaurs in the area were all miniature, implying that either large amounts of baby dinosaurs spent the first stage in their lives here, or that the area was home to dwarf dinosaurs. Several Russian scientists also theorize that the remains of these stegosaurs, as well as the remains of allosaurids in the same area, could imply that the area could have once been a "refugium", where these Jurassic dinosaurs managed to survive into the Cretaceous period.
  It has often been suggested that the decline in stegosaur diversity was part of a Jurassic-Cretaceous transition, where angiosperms become the dominant plants, causing a faunal turnover where new groups of herbivores evolved. Although in general the case for such a c
caption: Huayangosaurus is the oldest and most basal stegosaurian of which good material is known, giving an impression of the build of the earliest members of the group
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