skin

An Ankylosaurus head (cast of specimen AMNH 5214), on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. This is from a specimen collected in Custer County, Montana. The Ankylosauria were armored dinosaurs that lived from 122 million years ago to 66 million years ago in western North America, Europe, and East Asia. There were two subgroups: The Nodosauridae and Ankylosauridae. The Ankylosauridae contained six species, and a single subfamily -- the Ankylosaurinae. There 18 genus within the subfamily, of which Ankylosaurus is the best known. Ankylosaurus as the last of these, and lived 65.5 to 66.5 million years ago. Ankylosaurus was about 20.5 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 5.5 feet tall at the hip. It walked on all fours, with the rear legs longer than the front ones. They ripped vegetation, and swallowed it whole. Their defining feature was their armor. They body was covered in thick, heavy bony plates, and most of the plates were fused together to make them even stronger. Embedded in the skin were more knobs of bone, and the outer skin above these knobs covered in keratin (the same stuff fingernails are made of). Ankylosaurus had a tail club, which consisted of several large osteoderms fused to the last few tail vertebrae. Ankylosaurus was discovered in 1908.

Rebun Island lies in the Sea of Japan off the northwestern tip of Hokkaido and is part of the Rishiri-Rebun-Sarobetsu National Park. Momoiwa ("Peach Rock") was created in a relatively new era of Rebun Island's strata when underground magma pushed the earth's surface upward where it cooled into a huge spherical rock formation. Spheroidal joints (plate-shaped joints on the surface) peeled away like the skin of an onion, revealing the scree, which cooled at a slower rate than the surface, creating the columnar jointing that can be seen.