Ankylosaurs’ Tail Club To Whack Off Each Other: Sources Confirms

Dec, 2022 - By WMR

New Research on Ankylosaurs suggests that the tail clubs on their tail is to whack off each other rather than to scare off their predators.

According to the report published in a paper, it claims with proper evidences that the injury marks on the ankylosaur was as a result to compete or combat with each other rather than to fight predators. For years, it was believed to fight predators but the the ankylosaurs like the Zuul crurivastator have been using to fight among each other for ages. Dr. Victoria Arbour, the Curator of Paleontology at the Royal British Museum and a former NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto is the lead author of the research which tries to find out the real purpose of the ankylosaurs’ tail clubs.

Ankylosaurs is a group of the Stegosaurus that has been using their tail clubs for intraspecific purposes as in fighting with each other. Ankylosaurs tail club is a hard bony structure, but the stegosaurus had a tail of spiked structure. The clubs of any type is known to cause injuries but the clubs of large size could even break the bones. Ankylosaurs who had smaller tail could strike very fast though was unable to break the bones. Some studies even claim that they were used as a weapon or to throw away the predators from the neck. But one theory that cannot be fully wiped off is that the tail clubs was used as a competition among the same species. In modern times, giraffes can be a comparison where it uses its necks and heads along with their horns called ‘ossicones‘in combact.

Researchers concluded that the type of injuries is not likely in accordance with only the predators attack. Rather they were more likely to appear on the animals’ side with more or less damage of equal size. The struggle of competition among all theories and researches will linger on until more and more evidences are floated forward.