When was triceratops first discovered

Explore dinosaurs by:. Name A-Z. When they lived. Late Triassic. Where they were found. Type of dinosaur. Armoured dinosaurs. What they ate. Other animals. Comparison of the size of Torosaurus latus specimens. Torosaurus is a large ceratopsid found in the same formation as Triceratops.

It is larger and the frill is distinctly different, being longer, with large holes near the top. In Scannella and Horner published a paper demonstrating that Torosaurus was actually a late, rapid, growth stage of Triceratops.

This stirred all kinds of controversy. Paleontologists were taking sides, some agreed and some disagreed. Personally, I always had trouble with how two large holes could simply erode in the frill bone.

That would really transform the entire muscle attachment structures. Within the last few years, many papers have been published refuting Scannella and Horner's results. In the ceratopsid dinosaur expert Dr. Andy Farke published a paper showing Torosaurus is "a genus distinct from Triceratops and Nedoceratops. They studied various Torosaurus and Triceratops skulls and did a clustering analysis to arrange them in growth series.

They found immature and mature individuals of both Torosaurus and Triceratops. Therefore, they could be the same animal. Triceratops and Torosaurus are different Dinosaurs. The image above is from Longrich and Field It shows an adult and a subadult Torosoarus. Most of the Ceratopsids had huge frills with the exceptions of Diceratops and Triceratops.

These two genera had frills that were comparatively reduced in size Fastovsky p. As for the horns, many people forget when they see a fossil Triceratops or other Ceratopsid Dinosaurs, the horns on the skull are the bone cores. These bone cores would have been covered by the actual horns, which would have been much longer in life. Unfortunately, it's impossible to verify what horns and frills were actually used for. However, using modern herding animals as an analogy, it's likey they were used for dominance, defense, and display.

Ceratopsids may have used their horns within their own species for territorialism and mating rights. This matches the fossil evidence, as puncture wounds have been commonly found in skulls and frills of Triceratops from other Triceratops, indicating some form of intraspecies combat Farke, et al, A study showed that if two adult Triceratops rammed each other head on, their skulls would shatter!

However, Ceratopsid horns were shaped different than any mammilian counterpart. Instead of ramming, they may have simply locked horns and fought. A study using models found it was physically possible for triceratops to engage in horn locking behavior Farke, Andrew, A. They found 3 possible horn locking arrangements. Instead of ramming each other, they would lock horns and fight, sort of like how moose will lock horns when fighting.

It is interesting to note, that there is one exception. A different genera, Centrosaurus, a ceratopsid with only 1 large nasal horn, was studied by Farke Farke, et al, and was found to be absent of injuries. This means Centrosaurs probably did not use their horns and frills for mating or territorial combat, but instead for display purposes, like a peacock.

A firgure from Farke's paper is shown below. It shows incidence rates of showing incidence rates of lesions in A Triceratops and B Centrosaurus. Not to scale. Farke, Ewan D. Wolff, Darren H. Moral of the story, if Triceratops used them for mating behavior and Centrosaurus used them for display, horns and frills were probably used in a variety of different ways by different types of ceratopsids.

One use of the horns and frills by many ceratopsids was probably to ward off predators. Some ceratopsid fossils have even been found with healed T-rex bite marks, these are specimens that have successfully staved off a T-Rex attack. While many others have been found with unhealed bite marks, meaning they were T-Rex food.

Because of these fossil finds, it is not unreasunable to assume the frill and horns were also used to fend off the mighty T-Rex that lived in the Western U. But in , a study of more than 50 Triceratops skulls from the Hell Creek Formation found that Triceratops horridus skulls appeared only in the lower layers of rock, while Triceratops prorsus was found only in the upper layers.

Skulls in the middle layers had features of both species. This finding suggests that Triceratops horridus evolved into the other species over one or two million years. No species of Triceratops lived much longer than that.

Sixy-six million years ago—about three million years after the dinosaur first appeared— a 7. The subsequent environmental catastrophe killed off more than three-quarters of all species on the planet, including Triceratops and its fellow non-avian dinosaurs. All rights reserved. Common Name: Triceratops.

Scientific Name: Triceratops horridus. Type: Prehistoric Animals. Diet: Herbivore. Size: About 30 feet long. Weight: Six to eight tons. Size relative to a bus:.

Share Tweet Email. It also likely used its horns and bulk to tip over taller plants. It had up to teeth that were constantly being replenished, and were arranged in groups called batteries, with each battery having 36 to 40 tooth columns in each side of each jaw and three to five teeth per column, the Evolution study notes.

It may have eaten a range of plants, including ferns, cycads and palms. In , the first bones of a Triceratops were discovered in Denver and were sent to Othniel Charles Marsh. At first, Marsh believed it was a bison. It wasn't until more Triceratops bones were found in that Marsh gave the beast the name Triceratops.

While no complete skeleton has been unearthed, partial skeletons and skulls, including some from babies , have been found in Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Canada Saskatchewan and Alberta. Triceratops was confined to North America because the continent had already split from Europe and, along with South America, had begun to drift across the ocean by the time the dinosaur evolved. Triceratops fossils have typically been discovered as solitary individuals.

But in a article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , scientists reported the first discovery of a Triceratops "bonebed," which contained three juvenile remains together and suggested a gregarious and possibly herding nature to the dinosaurs.

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