A new explanation for ankylosaurs’ clubbed tails

Few dinosaurs evoke images of dramatic battle better than Ankylosaurus. This seven-metre-long late-Cretaceous herbivore, shielded by thick bony plates and armed with a club at the end of its tail, has been depicted for decades using its weapon to batter the likes of Tyrannosaurus. No doubt it did, if need arose. But a paper in Biology Letters by Victoria Arbour of the Royal British Columbia Museum, in Victoria, Canada, suggests this was not a club’s main purpose. That, she and her colleagues reckon, was to bash other ankylosaurs.