 One of the most recognizable of all dinosaurs , Stegosaurus has been depicted on film , in cartoons and comics , as children 's toys , and was even declared the State Dinosaur of Colorado in 1982 . Due to the fragmentary nature of most early Stegosaurus fossil finds , it took many years before reasonably accurate restorations of these animals could be produced . The earliest popular image of Stegosaurus was an engraving produced by A. Tobin for the November 1884 issue of Scientific American , which included the dinosaur amid a speculative Morrison age landscape . Tobin restored the Stegosaurus as bipedal and long @-@ necked , with the plates arranged along the tail and the back covered in spikes . This covering of spikes might have been based on a misinterpretation of the teeth , which Marsh had noted were oddly shaped , cylindrical , and found scattered , such that he thought they might turn out to be small dermal spines . 
