A new explanation for ankylosaurs’ clubbed tails

evoke images of dramatic battle better than . 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 . No doubt it did, if need arose. But a paper in 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.Ankylosaurs came in many species. itself was merely the first to be discovered. In 2017 Dr Arbour and her team found yet another. They called it . Zuul was a demon in “Ghostbusters”, a film from the 1980s. This demon’s head, they thought, resembled that of their find. “Crurivastator” means “destroyer of shins”—for back then, Dr Arbour accepted conventional wisdom that tail-clubs were for bashing the legs of predators.