Polacanthine
| Nodosaurids Temporal range: Late Jurassic - Late Cretaceous, 155–66 Ma |
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| Mounted skeleton of Animantarx | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | †Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | †Ankylosauria |
| Family: |
†Nodosauridae Marsh, 1890 |
| Subgroups | |
| Synonyms | |
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Acanthopholididae Nopcsa, 1902 |
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Acanthopholididae Nopcsa, 1902
Acanthopholidae Nopcsa, 1917
?Hylaeosauridae Nopcsa, 1902
Polacanthidae Wieland, 1911 Palaeoscincidae Nopcsa, 1918
Panoplosauridae Nopcsa, 1929
Struthiosauridae Kuhn, 1966
Edmontoniidae Bakker, 1988
Nodosauridae is a family of ankylosaurian dinosaurs, from the Late Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous Period of what are now North America, Europe, Asia, and Antarctica.
Nodosaurids, like their close relatives the ankylosaurids, were heavily armored dinosaurs adorned with rows of bony armor nodules and spines (osteoderms) which were covered in keratin sheaths. All nodosaurids, like other ankylosaurians, were medium-sized to large, heavily built quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaurs, possessing small leaf-shaped teeth. Unlike ankylosaurids, nodosaurids lacked mace-like tail clubs, instead having flexible tail tips. Many nodosaurids had spikes projecting outward from their shoulders. One particularly well-preserved nodosaurid "mummy", known as the Suncor nodosaur (Borealopelta), preserved a nearly complete set of armor in life position, as well as the keratin covering and mineralized remains of the underlying skin.
The family Nodosauridae was erected by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1890, and anchored on the genus Nodosaurus.
The clade Nodosauridae was first defined by Paul Sereno in 1998 as "all ankylosaurs closer to Panoplosaurus than to Ankylosaurus," a definition followed by Vickaryous, Maryanska, and Weishampel in 2004. Vickaryous et al. considered two genera of nodosaurids to be of uncertain placement (incertae sedis): Struthiosaurus and Animantarx, and considered the most primitive member of the Nodosauridae to be Cedarpelta. The cladogram below follows the most resolved topology from a 2011 analysis by paleontologists Richard S. Thompson, Jolyon C. Parish, Susannah C. R. Maidment and Paul M. Barrett. The placement of Polacanthinae follows its original definition by Kenneth Carpenter in 2001.
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