12th century Ta-prohm Cambodia temple carvings: it’s a style, not a stegosaur

They are fun to look at.
One of the Ta-prohm temple carvings really does look like it has stegosaur plates (Fig 1).

Unfortunately for that hypothesis, it also looks like the quadrupedal creature has
long ears, no neck, hooves and a ?rhino face, as others have noted.

Nobody acknowledges the ?monkey at the bottom
is wearing a barrister wig of leaves, has a beard of leaves, has goat hind limbs and Alfred E Newman’s silly grin.

Nobody cares that the ?elephant in the second circle
lacks a trunk, ears and tusks. It’s hard to understand it without those elements. It’s hard to understand what that animal is without those elements, so it is intrinsically less interesting.

Nobody wonders why the ?rodent in the fourth circle
also has stegosaur plates (= leaves) on its chest and stomach. It also lacks limbs.

Bottom line: no one in the 12th century knew anything of stegosaurs,
but the sculptor was familiar with flames, leaves, rodents, snakes, rhinos, monkeys, beetles and elephants, all apparently present in this crude yet clever temple carving.

BTW, stone sculpture is difficult.
By carving out only the lines and spaces between the subjects, the leaves, the flames and the snake frames, there is much less chipping, pounding and carving to do. Thus the ornate backgrounds may have served to save time and effort while creating a 12th century Cambodian version of the centuries later convergent European Baroque period, or a prequel to the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymous Bosch.

References
Other workers, archaeologists, enthusiasts, etc provide online essays, videos, etc starting here.