Triceratops
Late Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago
In the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs a Triceratops stands four square on thick legs, its huge head lowered so that the three horns and the bony frill face you like a shield. Two long brow horns curve forward above the eyes, a shorter horn sits on the nose, and the frill flares back over the neck. It was one of the last dinosaurs to evolve and one of the last alive when the asteroid struck, and it shared the plains of western North America with Tyrannosaurus.
The skull is the thing to study. Triceratops had one of the largest heads of any land animal, sometimes more than two metres long, and the beak at the front was as sharp as a parrot's. Behind it, batteries of teeth arranged in columns sliced tough plants like scissors. The frill was probably for display and for recognising others of its kind rather than for defence, though healed puncture wounds on some skulls show that Tyrannosaurus bit them. Look at the heavy shoulder blades and the way the front legs are set slightly apart, a posture that puzzled scientists for decades and is now thought to be accurate.
The museum's fossil halls, reorganised in the 1990s, are laid out as a walk through the evolutionary tree, and Triceratops sits on the branch of dinosaurs with bird like hips that also includes the duck billed hadrosaurs and armoured ankylosaurs nearby. The museum's collectors, led by Barnum Brown, gathered many of the finest Triceratops fossils known from Montana and Wyoming in the early twentieth century, and this mount combines bones from that era of exploration.
Did You Know? The name Triceratops means three horned face, but the first specimen, a pair of horns found in Colorado, was mistaken for a giant bison.
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