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Resurgent discoveries

As part of the Dinosaur Renaissance and the resurgent interest in dinosaurs by museums and the public, fossils of Stegosaurus were once again being collected, though few have been fully described. An important discovery came in 1937 again at Garden Park by a high school teacher named Frank Kessler in while leading a nature hike. Kessler contacted the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who sent paleontologist Robert Landberg. Landberg excavated the skeleton with the DMNS crews, recovering a 70% complete Stegosaurus skeleton along with turtles, crocodiles, and isolated dinosaur fossils at the quarry that would be nicknamed "The Kessler Site". Phillip Reinheimer, a steel worker, mounted the Stegosaurus skeleton at the DMNS in 1938. The skeleton remained mounted until 1989 when the museum curator of the DMNS began a revision of the museum's fossil hall and dispatched an expedition to find additional Stegosaurus remains. The expedition was successful in finding a nearly complete Stegosaurus near the Kessler site by Bryan Small, who would become the eponym of the new site. The "Small Quarry" Stegosaurus' articulation and completeness clarified the position of plates and spikes on the back of Stegosaurus and the position and size of the throat ossicles found earlier first by Felch with the Stegosaurus stenops holotype, though like the S. stenops type, the fossils were flattened in a "roadkill" condition. The Stegosaurus skeletons have been mounted alongside an Allosaurus skeleton collected in Moffat County, Colorado originally in 1979.

1987 saw the discovery of a 40% complete Stegosaurus skeleton in Rabbit Valley in Mesa County, Colorado by Harold Bollan near the Dinosaur Journey Museum. The skeleton was nicknamed the "Bollan Stegosaurus" and is in the collections of the Dinosaur Journey Museum. At Jensen-Jensen Quarry, an articulated torso including several dorsal plates from a small individual were collected and briefly described in 2014, though the specimen was collected years before and is still in preparation at Brigham Young University. 2007 saw the description of a Stegosaurus specimen from the Upper Jurassic Lourinha Formation of Portugal, the specimen was placed as cf. Stegosaurus ungulatus by the describers. The specimen is one of the few associated Stegosaurus skeletons known, though it only contains a tooth, 13 vertebrae, partial limbs, a cervical plate, and several assorted postcranial elements.

Sophie the Stegosaurus is the best preserved Stegosaurus specimen, being 85% intact and containing 360 bones. Sophie was first discovered by Bob Simon in 2003 at a quarry on the Red Canyon Ranch near Shell, Wyoming, and was excavated by crews from the Swiss Sauriermuseum in 2004 and later prepared by museum staff, who gave it the nickname Sarah after the landowner's daughter. The skeleton had been excavated on private land and was available for purchase. The Natural History Museum, London worked with private donors, most notably Jeremy Herrmann, to find the funding and then arranged to purchase the specimen, which was given the new official museum collection specimen designation NHMUK PV R36730 and re-nicknamed Sophie after Jeremy Herrmann's daughter. The mounted skeleton went on display in December 2014 and was scientifically described in 2015. It is a young adult of undetermined sex, 5.8 m (19 ft) long and 2.9 m (9.5 ft) tall. The Sauriermuseum found several partial Stegosaurid skeletons throughout their excavations at Howe Quarry, Wyoming in the 1990s, though only Sophie has been described in detail. One skeleton collected at the site known as "Victoria" is very well preserved including many of the vertebrae preserved in semi-articulation and next to an Allosaurus skeleton found nicknamed "Big Al II".