Sophie the Stegosaurus
Late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago
Just inside the Exhibition Road entrance, before the escalator carries you up through the globe, a Stegosaurus stands in a pool of light with its plates raised like sails. This is Sophie, the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton known anywhere in the world. More than three hundred bones, over eighty five percent of the animal, are original fossil, and they belonged to a young adult that was not yet fully grown. The name is a nickname, chosen after the daughter of the donor who helped the museum acquire it, and nobody actually knows whether the dinosaur was female.
Walk around the skeleton and take in the strange proportions. The head is tiny, barely bigger than a horse's, and the brain inside it was about the size of a plum. The back legs are far longer than the front ones, so the body slopes upward to a high, arched hip. Along the spine run seventeen bony plates, arranged in two staggered rows, and at the tip of the tail are four long spikes, a weapon palaeontologists call the thagomizer. The plates were too thin to be armour and were probably for display or for regulating body heat. Because Sophie is so complete, researchers have been able to estimate her weight at about one and a half tonnes and to study how her jaws worked.
The skeleton was found in 2003 at Red Canyon Ranch in Wyoming and came to London in 2014. Stegosaurus had been known since 1877, but every earlier skeleton was a patchwork of several individuals. Sophie is a single animal, which is why she has become one of the most studied dinosaurs of the twenty first century.
Did You Know? Sophie's skull is so well preserved that scientists have scanned her braincase and measured the tiny space where her brain sat.
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