The sauropelta are large black or green plant-eating dinosaurs that are related to the ankylosaurus, edmontonia, and dracopelta. A sauropelta
A drawing of a real-life Sauropelta.
called Akk appears as a minor character in the Astrosaurs Academy series, and is an astrosaur cadet who works for the DSS. Pilot Marsh is another sauropelta who flies the Zeta Three, carrying star-vaults across the Jurassic Quadrant. Their home planet is Sauroplos.
Real Sauropelta were nodosaurs, cousins of the ankylosaurs, from Early Cretaceous North America around 115 to 110 million years ago. It was related to other nodosaurs like Edmontonia. Sauropelta is medium-sized for a nodosaur at 6 metres long, recognizable for the spikes on its shoulders, extensive armour, and long tail. Its body was short and stout to help the dinosaur support the weight of its defensive armour - 2 tons.
Sauropelta is the earliest definitively identified nodosaur in the fossil record. The nodosaurs are one of two ankylosaur families along with the ankylosaurids. The two groups existed together in the same time period and are hard to tell apart. Most ankylosaurids such as Ankylosaurus had tail clubs (with some exceptions, like Dracopelta), which nodosaurs lacked. There are small differences in the shape of the skull that scientists use to distinguish between an ankylosaurid and a nodosaur.
The first Sauropelta fossils were found in Montana by the famous scientist Barnum Brown, but it wasn’t until 1970 that it was identified and described by John Ostrom, an important palaeontologist behind the “dinosaur renaissance” who helped to change the popular image of dinosaurs from slow, cold-blooded, and stupid swamp-dwellers to active, successful, warm-blooded creatures which had more in common with birds than lizards. Its name means "lizard shield".