Bananas for Scale
Ankylosaurus

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Ankylosaurus

The armored dinosaur with a built-in wrecking ball/Dinosaurs & Extinct Animals

Ankylosaurus was a living tank — a heavily armored herbivore covered in bony plates called osteoderms embedded in its skin. Its signature feature was a massive bony club at the end of its tail, which it could swing with enough force to break a predator's leg. Living in the Late Cretaceous about 68 to 66 million years ago, it shared its habitat with T. rex, which may explain why it evolved such ridiculous levels of armor. Ankylosaurus essentially said "hit me" and meant it.

Measurements

Body length6.25 m
73.5Shuttlecock lengths
1.6 hundredthsSupertankers
104Stacked hamsters
Estimated mass6,000 kg
6 millionPaperclips
1,538Gallons of milk
6,000Pineapples

About 6 tonnes

Tail club mass40 kg
3,478AAA batteries
100Cans of soup

Estimated mass of the bony club

Armor thickness5 hundredths m
25 millionDNA helices
341 millionthsGreat Pyramid heights

Osteoderms up to 5 cm thick

Body width1.7 m
37.8Matchsticks
5.9 hundredthsBasketball court lengths

Extremely wide and low-slung

Tail club impact force47,000 N
15,667Fridge magnet pulls
235,000Chicken nugget weights
1,880Cork pops

Estimated; enough to fracture bone

Height1.7 m
8.4 tenthsDoor heights
3.3 thousandthsMall of America lengths

At the hip

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