Nodosaurus

Nodosaurus (meaning 'knobbed lizard') is a genus of herbivorous nodosaurid ankylosaurian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, the fossils of which are found exclusively in the Frontier Formation in Wyoming.

==Discovery and naming== thumb|Historical reconstruction of the holotype skeleton from 1921 Fossils of Nodosaurus were first discovered on 17 July, 1881 by fossil collector William Harlow Reed in Albany County, Wyoming in the western United States. This discovery was made during the Bone Wars, a scientific competition between paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, and as part of an expedition to the Jurassic-aged strata of the Morrison Formation in Como Bluff. The remains, cataloged as YPM VP 1815 at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, found included: 3 dorsal and 13 caudal vertebrae, 3 dorsal ribs, fragmentary forelimbs, a partial pelvis, femora, tibiae, partial left pes, and several osteoderms. The fossils all came from a single quarry located around from Quarry 13 of Como Bluff. However, the outcrop the Nodosaurus skeleton was unearthed from comes from the Frontier Formation, also known as the Dakota Sandstone, which dates to the Cenomanian age of the Late Cretaceous period.