Remains of ankylosaurs, a popular family of heavily armoured dinosaurs, occur in sedimentary sequences that range in age from early Jurassic to the close of the Cretaceous. Their defences seem almost impregnable, being constructed of thick, fused scales, often bearing formidable spines, which covered them completely. They bore a crude resemblance to modern armadillos apart from the fact that they were unable to roll-up defensively. In some species the rigid tail bears a large, knob of scale tissue. At up to 3 m long, were the tail to be swung it would have packed bone-cracking momentum. Interestingly, to a poorly sighted predator the club may have been mistaken for the animal’s head at the end of a long neck, so perhaps it lured a potential assailant within range of its devastating power. The largest ankylosaur, from the Cretaceous of western Canada, was the size of a small bus, up to 8m long, 1.5 m wide, standing 1.7 m high and weighing in at around 5 to 8 t. Such dimensions would have made it almost impossible to be bitten, even by the largest predatory dinosaurs, and difficult to turn over. Their teeth show that ankylosaurs were herbivorous, and their somewhat bulbous bodies almost certainly contained a massive digestion system.
The mystery lies in the fact that most ankylosaur fossils are found lying on their backs. Early dinosaur aficionados suggested a tendency for the lumbering beasts to tumble down slopes and become stranded on their backs, so to die miserably. Such clumsiness is hardly a positive characteristic of evolutionary fitness for such a long-lived group, and, besides, the sedimentary formations in which they are found indicate very gentle slopes. So, were they flipped by dextrous predators, as imagined in some early films purporting to look to the distant past? Probably not, for most well preserved fossils show no sign of bites or gnawing. From a study of 36 late-Cretaceous ankylosaurs from Alberta four Canadian and US palaeontologists (Mallon, J.C. et al. 2018. A “bloat-and-float” taphonomic model best explains the upside-down preservation of ankylosaurs. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 497, p. 117-127; doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2018.02.010 support the idea of their carcases or even living animals having been picked up by flood waters when their high centre of gravity would have flipped them upside down. Bloating through decay might then allow them to be transported large distances. Unsurprisingly, their conclusions rest on model simulations.
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