page_title: Kentrosaurus
section_title: Discovery and species
hierarchical_section_title: Kentrosaurus / Discovery and species
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Fossil of Kentrosaurus, an extinct reptile - Took the picture at Museum of Paleontology of Tuebingen
context_page_description: Kentrosaurus is a genus of stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Tanzania. The type species is K. aethiopicus, named and described by German palaeontologist Edwin Hennig in 1915. Often thought to be a "primitive" member of the Stegosauria, several recent cladistic analyses find it as more derived than many other stegosaurs, and a close relative of Stegosaurus from the North American Morrison Formation within the Stegosauridae.
  Fossils of K. aethiopicus have been found only in the Tendaguru Formation, dated to the late Kimmeridgian and early Tithonian ages, about 152 million years ago. Hundreds of bones were unearthed by German expeditions to German East Africa between 1909 and 1912. Although no complete skeletons are known, the remains provided a nearly complete picture of the build of the animal.
  Kentrosaurus generally measured around 4.5 metres in length as an adult, and weighed about one tonne. It walked on all fours with straight hindlimbs. It had a small, elongated head with a beak used to bite off plant material that would be digested in a large gut. It had a, probably double, row of small plates running down its neck and back.
context_section_description: The first fossils of Kentrosaurus were discovered by the German Tendaguru Expedition in 1909, recognised as belonging to a stegosaur by expedition leader Werner Janensch on 24 July 1910, and described by German palaeontologist Edwin Hennig in 1915. The name Kentrosaurus was coined by Hennig and comes from the Greek kentron/κέντρον, meaning "sharp point" or "prickle", and sauros/σαῦρος meaning "lizard", Hennig added the specific name aethiopicus to denote the provenance from Africa.
  From 1909 onwards, Kentrosaurus remains were uncovered in four quarries in the Mittlere Saurierschichten (Middle Saurian Beds) and one quarry in the Obere Saurierschichten (Upper Saurian Beds). During four field seasons, the German Expedition found over 1200 bones of Kentrosaurus, belonging to about fifty individuals, many of which were destroyed during the Second World War. Today, almost all remaining material is housed in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (roughly 350 remaining specimens), while the museum of the Institute for Geosciences of the University of Tübingen houses a composite mount, roughly 50% of it being original bones.
  Although no complete individuals were found, some material was discovered in association, including a nearly complete tail, hip, several dorsal vertebrae and some limb elements of one individual. These form the core of a mount in the Museum für Naturkunde by Janensch. The mount was dismantled during the museum renovation in 2006/2007, and re-mounted in an improved pose by Research Casting International. Some other material, including a braincase and spine, was thought to have been misplaced or destroyed during World War II. However, all the supposedly lost cranial material was later found in a drawer of a basement cupboard.
  The type and sole accepted species of Kentrosaurus is Kentrosaurus aethiopicus, named by Hennig in 1915. Fragmentary fossil material from Wyoming, named Stegosaurus longispinus by Charles Gilmore in 1914, was in 1993 classified as a North American species of Kentrosaurus, as K. longispinus. However, this action was not accepted by the paleontological community, and S. longispinus has been assigned to its own genus, Alcovasaurus, differing from Kentrosaurus in having more elongated tail spikes and the structure of the pelvis and vertebrae.
caption: Endocasts of the sacral ganglion and brain at Museum of Paleontology of Tübingen.
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