Field Notes

Ankylosaurus

Say it: an-KY-loh-SOR-us

Boiler, an Ankylosaurus, six tons and wider than a car, armoured and low to the ground.
The one in the books, drawn to the evidence on this page.

It means fused lizard, because the bones of its skull grew together into one lumpy helmet. Late Cretaceous, about sixty-six million years ago, Montana and Alberta. Around twenty-six feet long, wider than a car, and about six tons — roughly what a garbage truck weighs. Boiler is a big one, and that is a real size.

The club is a hammer with a bone handle

The lump on the end is not a rock he swallowed. It is plates of bone from the skin, fused together and locked onto the last few tail bones — and the tail in front of it is not floppy, because those vertebrae interlock and are laced with stiffened tendons. Half a tail of rigid handle, one heavy head. A scientist named Victoria Arbour built models of ankylosaur tails and worked out how hard a big club could swing. Hard enough to break bone. Boiler swings his blind, at hip height, at whatever is behind him, which is why every deck at the Roost has a Club Line painted twelve feet back.

His nose is not a straight pipe

Put an ankylosaur skull through a CT scanner and the airway inside is not a short tube from nostril to throat. It loops. It doubles back, runs most of the length of the head, and comes back again, like somebody coiled a garden hose inside a suitcase. Nobody is certain why. The best guesses: it cooled the blood on its way to the brain in a hot world, it made him very good at smelling, and all that folded tube may have worked something like the inside of a trumpet. Boiler's hum comes up through a deck plank and you feel it in your feet before you hear it.

How we know

Bone, mostly, and machines borrowed from hospitals. Ankylosaurs turn up upside down more often than not — twenty-six out of thirty-six in one count — because a dead one bloats, floats belly-up and rolls when it washes into a river. Annoying if you wanted the armor. Excellent if you wanted the belly.

What we made up. The yard broom, the water cannon geared off the tail swing, and the idea that he would ever choose anybody. The size, the plates, the club and the looped nose: real. How much he sleeps: made up — and we are saying so, because no bone anywhere records how long a dinosaur slept.

This page is printed at the back of The Impossible Rig, one of ten. Copy it, print it, read it out in a classroom — that is what it is for.