Pinacosaurus the Fourth

Pinacosaurus is back, and this time it's got a sneeze and it's not afraid to use it.

This brilliant piece of art was made by HodariNundu, inspired by my post on Pinacosaurus tongues. Take a look at his awesome DeviantArt gallery, it's packed full of imaginative depictions of prehistoric life: here.
I have loved all of the art you guys have done inspired by post, but this has got to be the most imaginative so far. He can explain his idea much better than I can, so I'll quote him here:

 A Velociraptor learns that just because the front end of an ankylosaur lacks a club,
doesn´t mean it's necessarily harmless. I was inspired to draw this by a blog post by fellow deviant in which the idea of Pinacosaurus and other Asian ankylosaurs as possible eaters of social insects is explored.
I had already heard of the idea and drew something inspired by it, as some of you probably remember. However, re-reading it, it occured to me... those guys not only had long tongues, they also seemingly had large cavities in their noses which are sort of a mystery (unless I'm wrong) and have been interpreted as possible air sacs to inflate colorful or resonating sacs. But what if that's not all? What if the insect-eater hypothesis is right, and some ankylosaurs spent most of their early years feeding on ants and whatever social insect was around during the Cretaceous?
What if they, like today's horny toad of the North American deserts, sequestered the formic acid of its prey and concentrated it in their own blood? What if they had lots of vessels on their nose that could burst and squirt relatively large amounts of blood and snot laced with acid to the face of its enemies?
Horny toads squirt acid-laced blood through their eyes, and although this defense doesn´t work as well on birds as it does on mammals, and so one should wonder how much of an effect it would have on a Velociraptor, I still thought it was an interesting idea to portray. In any case, being soaked in sticky blood snot would probably make you sticky and dirty, attract insects, and maybe even larger, hungry predators (if they were around), making ankylosaurs prey to be avoided whenever possible...

By the way, it may seem difficult to believe that an animal as large as an ankylosaur would feed exclusively on insects (even though it's not impossible, seeing how nutritious they are, enough that animals as large as bears dedicate lots of time to find and eat them, and also, c´mon, blue whales and krill?). It may be that the juveniles were the ones eating most insects and eventually shifted to a more vegetarian diet as they grew, not unlike many grain-eating birds that feed their chicks with insects today, because of the protein and all that. Who knows! All speculation here. 

HodariNundu's Edit:

 Forgot to add, some ankylosaurs had armored eyelids too. Why? Did small-ish predators such as Velociraptor have the nasty habit of poking the eyes out of their larger prey to render them defenseless? Were the ankylosaurs feeding on very thorny plants? Or perhaps on biting, stinging or formic-acid rich insects? Who knows, maybe they needed protection against rival ankylosaurs and their ACID SNEEZE

 

This depiction of Pinacosaurus is exactly the sort of thing that I love: speculative and imaginative, not afraid to push the boundaries. Well done HodariNundu, and thanks for your art - the same goes to everybody else who has created images of Pinacosaurus for this.