Hatcher the Triceratops

The original mount was a composite, built from the bones of about ten different individuals of different sizes, which is why the front and back legs did not quite match and the feet were partly borrowed from a duck-billed dinosaur. In the late 1990s the skeleton was taken down, scanned and rebuilt with corrected proportions, one of the first dinosaurs to be studied with digital modelling. For the new fossil hall the bones were posed on the ground beneath the Tyrannosaurus, and some of the original fossils were replaced by casts to protect them. Look at the skull, which is about two metres long: the bony frill and the two long brow horns were probably for display and for contests between rivals as much as for defence, and the beak at the front was used to snip tough vegetation.

Triceratops was the last and largest of the horned dinosaurs, living at the very end of the Cretaceous alongside Tyrannosaurus, and it was among the most common large animals of its world. Its bones have been found with healed bite marks that match tyrannosaur teeth, so the scene in front of you is not a fantasy. Notice the small bump on the frill's edge, a row of bony knobs that would have been covered in horn in life.

Did You Know? Hatcher was the first Triceratops skeleton ever mounted, in 1905, and the original was built from the bones of about ten different animals.