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Re: Long-necked stegosaur coming out in Proceedings B
There's a third possibility, and it's been suggested for sauropods as
well. If the tail was the main
means of defense, then a longer tail may have given it a greater 'arc of
thagomization'. The
elongation of the neck may have just come along for the ride as a
counter-balancing measure.
I've only ever seen this proposed in Jurassic Park (the book) and
immediately attributed it to Crichton not thinking things through, or of
course not knowing most of said things in the first place. *Giraffatitan*
and similar sauropods, as well as all the "euhelopodids", had long necks and
rather short tails (even *Omeisaurus* and *Shunosaurus* with their tail
clubs); apart from the two just mentioned ones, only Flagellicaudata had
adaptations to waving their tails around, and of those, one half
(Dicraeosauridae) had remarkably short, not long, necks for sauropod
standards.
This is no surprise: using the neck as a counterweight doesn't make sense
because the neck consisted mostly of air (and the head was too small to
count), while the tail consisted mostly of muscle, followed by bone.
Similarly, all stegosaurs had a thagomizer, but only *Miragaia* had a long
neck.
Stegosaur _forelimbs_, on the other hand, _do_ show adaptations to anchoring
the body against the inertia of thagomizer swings.