Scientists on comparison of a number of ‘contestant’ species have declared so. Among the runner-ups were the sheep and muskox. But all these couldn’t match the excellence the old herbivore dinosaur. Sounds odd? Go on reading. The winner’s scientific name is Stegoceras validum. The skull which got it the prize is pachycephalosaur.

The winner contestant was brought before the judges from the specimen collected in the University of Alberta. The competition was held among a good number of species. They found the structure of the dinosaur’s skull best suited to protect the content. The results of this competition, read research are published in ‘PLoS ONE’.

“Pachycephalosaur domes are weird structures not exactly like anything in modern animals. We wanted to test the controversial idea that the domes were good for head butting,” says co-author Dr. Eric Snively, a post-doctoral researcher at biomedical engineering of Ohio University.

“Finding out brings us closer to their social lives: were pachycephalosaurs more likely just showing off their domes like peacocks with their tails, or were they also cracking their heads together like musk oxen?”

CT scanning and vast data on the behavior of the animals was studied before coming to the conclusion in the study.

“Our analyses are the closest we can get to observing their behavior. In a way, we can get “inside their heads” by colliding them together virtually. We combined anatomical and engineering analyses of all these animals for a pretty thorough approach,” says Snively. “We looked at the actual tissue types in the skulls and heads of the animals.”

One criterion used in the study was head butting which means a competition between males for access to females.

“It’s pretty clear that although the bones are arranged differently in the Stegoceras, it could easily withstand the kinds of forces that have been measured for the living animals that engage in head butting.”

The skull with the head-butting animals is generally dome shaped. “They have a stiff rind on the outside with a sort of a spongy energy absorbing material just beneath it and then a stiff, really dense coat over the brain,” says Snively. The Stegoceras’ head had an additional layer of bone in the mid of it. Stegoceras  lived nearly 72 million years ago and had a size of skull comparable to German shepherd. In this sense the head was not that large. It was rather appropriate for safety.

As of Giraffe and Llamas the researchers say, “They swing their necks at each other and try to hit each other in the neck or the side”. Giraffes do the head-butting as “Their anatomy isn’t built to absorb the collision as well as something like muskox or big horn sheep.”