 By 1891 , Marsh published a more familiar view of Stegosaurus , with a single row of plates . This was dropped fairly early on ( apparently because it was poorly understood how the plates were embedded in the skin and they were thought to overlap too much in this arrangement ) . It was revived , in somewhat modified form , in the 1980s , by Stephen Czerkas , based on the arrangement of iguana dorsal spines . 
