to people who don't get it
Borealopelta: its back was covered in heavy, armored scales, and a pair of 20-inch-long spikes jutted from its shoulders. It weighed 1.5 tons and was 20 feet from foot to tail. And it probably couldn’t swim very well. On land, countershading is a common trick among animals that need to hide from predators, like deer, antelope, and wild horses. But once prey animals get big enough, their bulk provides them with enough defense—that’s why rhinos and elephants are just uniformly gray. Borealopelta bucks that trend. It’s rhino-sized, and much bigger than any countershaded land animal around today. “The fact that this massive armored dinosaur with these huge spines still had countershading tells us that it was a common meal for the predators of the time,” Brown says. Such predators might have included Acrocanthosaurus, as long as Tyrannosaurus but more lightly built.