48 Fun Facts About Triceratops

What does the name Triceratops mean?

Three-horned face comes from the Greek tri, keras and ops. The same 'ops', which can also mean eye, gives the one-eyed Cyclops his name.

Which famous dinosaur had already been extinct for more than 70 million years when Triceratops appeared?

Stegosaurus died out about 145 million years ago and Triceratops arose about 68 million years ago. That gap is wider than the 66 million years between Triceratops and us.

In the 1988 animated film The Land Before Time, what is the name of Littlefoot's stubborn three-horned friend?

Cera belongs to what the film calls the three-horns. She first refuses to travel with Littlefoot because her father has taught her that three-horns never mix with other kinds.

Triceratops looks like a giant rhinoceros, though the two are unrelated; what is such a resemblance called?

Convergent evolution gives unrelated animals similar bodies for similar lives, as with the wings of bats and birds. Rhinos are mammals, so the horn and bulk arose twice.

The frill of Triceratops was long seen as a neck shield; what does the prevailing theory say it was mainly for?

Attracting mates is the leading idea. As a shield the frill fell short: some fossil frills carry the punctures of Tyrannosaurus teeth.

Triceratops belonged to which great group of dinosaurs, together with the duck-bills and the armoured dinosaurs?

Ornithischia means 'bird-hipped', after a hip bone that points backwards as it does in birds.

One Triceratops species lies in lower rock layers than the other; what does that suggest?

They were ancestor and descendant: a 2014 study of over 50 Montana skulls found the lower species turning into the upper over a million years or more. Skulls from the middle layers blend the features of both.

Which long-frilled horned dinosaur did a 2010 paper claim was simply Triceratops in old age?

Torosaurus was, on that reading, the final growth stage. Critics answered with young Torosaurus and very old Triceratops skulls, and the dispute goes on.

The original Triceratops skull that Othniel Marsh named in 1889 is kept at which university's museum?

Yale holds it because Marsh taught there as the first professor of paleontology in the United States. His collectors out West sent their finds back to its Peabody Museum.

The first Triceratops horns, found near Denver in 1887, were mistaken for which animal?

A giant bison was Marsh's verdict, and he named the horns Bison alticornis. Only when more bones turned up did he see they belonged to a horned dinosaur.

A rancher showed fossil hunter John Bell Hatcher the first piece of the original Triceratops skull; what was it?

A broken horn sat in the rancher's fossil collection, taken from a huge skull his foreman had found in a deep canyon. Hatcher went back that winter and dug out the rest.

Besides the United States, which country has yielded Triceratops fossils?

Canada: finds in Alberta and Saskatchewan mark the northern end of its range. It was strictly North American, though horned relatives with their own showy frills roamed China and Mongolia.

In Jurassic Park (1993), what is wrong with the Triceratops that the visitors stop to examine?

It has fallen sick and lies on its side, tended by the park vet. Ellie Sattler stays behind to work out what it has been eating, so she is away from the tour cars when the fences fail.

The life-size Triceratops statue at Washington's National Zoo was a gift from which kind of company, known for its dinosaur logo?

An oil company: Sinclair, whose trademark was a dinosaur, gave the fibreglass model to the Smithsonian in the 1960s. It is called Uncle Beazley after a dinosaur in a children's book.

Triceratops horns were longer in life than their fossil cores, because the bone was sheathed in which material?

Keratin, the stuff of fingernails and cattle horns, covered each bony core and rarely fossilises. The brow horns, about a metre long as bone, were longer and sharper on the living animal.

Tough plants wore down Triceratops teeth; how did the animal manage?

It kept growing new ones: each jaw held columns of three to five stacked teeth, up to 800 in all, with replacements coming through for the whole of its life.

Unlike most other ceratopsids, the frill of Triceratops was what?

Solid, without large openings: relatives carried bigger frills that were mostly open in the centre. The short solid sheet may have guarded the neck, though tyrannosaur bite marks show it was sometimes punctured.

The toothless beak at the front of a Triceratops's mouth is most often compared to that of which bird?

Parrot: the beak did no chewing, which fell to rows of teeth behind that sliced plants like shears. An early cousin is even named Psittacosaurus, the parrot lizard.

A 2012 study of Triceratops's elbows tipped a long argument towards which front-leg posture?

Upright, close to the body: early reconstructions sprawled the elbows out like a lizard's, since the shoulder joint can be rebuilt either way. Even one of its authors said the argument was not over.

The Triceratops nicknamed 'Lane', displayed in Houston, is famous for preserving what?

Large areas of skin: patches of fossilised hide were found in the rock around the skeleton, a rarity for any dinosaur. They show that Triceratops was covered in large, pebbly scales.

Dinosauria is usually defined as every descendant of the last common ancestor of Triceratops and which other group?

Modern birds: the definition names two far-apart members and counts everything descended from their shared ancestor. That makes a hummingbird as much a dinosaur as Triceratops was.

One Protoceratops, a small cousin of Triceratops, was fossilised while fighting which predator?

Velociraptor: the pair were found locked together in Mongolia in 1971, its foot claw in the plant-eater's neck and its arm clamped in the other's beak. A collapsing dune or sandstorm probably buried them mid-fight.

Triceratops fossils are among the most common of any dinosaur; how are its remains usually found?

One at a time: unlike many horned relatives, which left vast bonebeds, adults nearly always turn up alone. Rare finds of three youngsters, and later at least five animals that died together, hint at some social life.

What do researchers think punched the keyhole-shaped hole in the frill of the giant Triceratops Big John?

A rival's horn, most likely: the hole's size and shape fit a horn tip driven in from behind. Similar wounds on other skulls suggest these animals sparred with each other much as deer lock antlers.

Big John, the largest Triceratops skeleton known, fetched €6.6 million in 2021 at an auction in which city?

Paris: the Drouot auction house sold it to a private American collector for more than four times the expected price, a European record. A French museum director said public collections simply could not compete.

Big John was found in 2014 in which state, known for its Badlands?

South Dakota: the bones then went to a workshop in Trieste, Italy, for months of cleaning and rebuilding, which is how an American dinosaur came to be unveiled in an Italian piazza.

Big John's Italian restorers posed the mounted skeleton to echo which famous sculpture?

New York's Charging Bull: the workshop modelled the dinosaur's stance on Arturo Di Modica's bronze, which the sculptor installed outside the Stock Exchange without permission in 1989.

How do scientists know that one Triceratops survived a Tyrannosaurus bite to its brow horn?

The bitten bone had healed: bone regrows only in a living animal, so the tooth-marked horn shows its owner got away. Who started it, and whether the two ever fought head-on, is still argued.

Tooth marks on Triceratops frills suggest Tyrannosaurus did what to reach the rich meat of the neck?

Tore the head off: a 2012 study argued the frill carried too little flesh to be worth eating, so the predator gripped it as a handle and wrenched the skull away from the body.

Triceratops's deep, narrow beak is thought to have been best suited to what?

Grasping and plucking is the usual reading of its deep, narrow beak, the mark of a choosy feeder that picked its plants. The heavy work happened further back, where packed columns of teeth sheared the food to pieces.

Which tough plants of its day do researchers think Triceratops fed on?

Palms and cycads, along with ferns, top most lists of its likely food. London's Natural History Museum gives its diet simply as tough palm fronds, the kind of fibrous meal its shearing teeth were built to chop.

If Triceratops and its supposed adult form prove to be one animal, why would the name Triceratops survive?

It was named first, in 1889, two years before the long-frilled form, and under the rules of naming the older name wins. It is the other animal's name that would be dropped.

Trixie, a toy Triceratops voiced by Kristen Schaal, first appeared in which Pixar film?

Toy Story 3 introduced her among the toys of a little girl called Bonnie. At playtime Trixie throws herself into any scene, sure only that her character has just had life-changing news.

A year-old Triceratops already had stubby horns and a small frill; what did its describer conclude they were partly for?

Recognising their own kind was Mark Goodwin's reading: a baby far too young to court anyone has no use for a mating display, so the little horns and frill first served as a family badge.

As a Triceratops grew up, what happened to the two long horns above its eyes?

They swung round to point forward: a youngster's brow horns were short stubs curving backward, which straightened as it grew and finally swept forward, reaching about a metre long in adults.

Triceratops is the official dinosaur of which Yellowstone state?

Wyoming adopted it in 1994 with good reason: its fossils are so common there that one local author calls them 'a dime a dozen'. The skull that gave Triceratops its name was dug up there too.

Which series featured a Triceratops in its 2012 episode 'Dinosaurs on a Spaceship'?

Doctor Who sent Matt Smith's Doctor riding one to freedom through a vast spaceship full of dinosaurs. The creatures were part puppet and part computer graphics.

Charles R. Knight's mural of Triceratops facing Tyrannosaurus was made for the Field Museum in which city?

Chicago's Field Museum commissioned a whole series of prehistoric murals from Knight. He was legally blind and had to paint with his face only inches from the canvas.

In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the Triceratops Dinozord belongs to Billy, the team's brainy inventor, who is which Ranger?

The Blue Ranger, Billy, is the team's gadget-maker. His Triceratops fights alongside the Red Ranger's Tyrannosaurus, and the two old enemies lock together with three other Zords to form the Megazord.

Which adventure hero tames a living Triceratops, known as a gryf, and rides it in a 1921 novel?

Tarzan meets the gryfs in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan the Terrible, set in a lost valley where dinosaurs survive. He knows the beast from a museum skeleton in London, and masters one with a staff and a borrowed cry of 'Whee-oo'.

In the 1956 children's book The Enormous Egg, a Triceratops hatches on a New Hampshire farm from what?

A chicken egg, laid by an ordinary hen, is where it starts. Young Nate Twitchell names the hatchling Uncle Beazley and, once it outgrows the farm, takes it to the National Museum in Washington.

Regaliceratops, a Triceratops cousin named in 2015, has tiny, stubby brow horns; which comic-book character is it nicknamed after?

Hellboy, the comic hero whose horns are mere stumps, lent his name to a skull with two comically small brow horns. Its formal name is grander, chosen for a regal frill edged with plates like the points of a crown.

Triceratops is the most common dinosaur in which formation, also famous for Tyrannosaurus skeletons?

Hell Creek's rocks record the dinosaurs' final stretch, and a ten-year census of them found Triceratops the most common dinosaur of all. Tyrannosaurus came second, a predator at least as plentiful as the duck-billed plant-eaters around it.

Triceratops was one of the very last dinosaurs, alive right up to which event?

The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, set off by an asteroid strike 66 million years ago, ended its run. A horned dinosaur's brow horn, probably Triceratops, turned up in Montana just 13 centimetres below the layer that marks the impact.

A ranch lawsuit over the 'Dueling Dinosaurs', a Triceratops buried beside a tyrannosaur, turned on whether fossils legally count as what?

Minerals was the claim, because the ranch's mineral rights partly belonged to former co-owners. Montana's Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that fossils are not minerals, freeing the pair to go to a North Carolina museum.

Which Bone Wars enemy of Marsh named Agathaumas in 1872 from hips and ribs that may belong to Triceratops?

Edward Drinker Cope called it the 'marvellous forest-dweller', seventeen years before Marsh named Triceratops. With no skull to compare, nobody can prove the two are the same animal.

A full-grown Triceratops weighed about as much as which living animal?

An African elephant is a fair yardstick: estimates for a full-grown Triceratops run from about six to ten tonnes. That is far beyond any living rhinoceros, the animal it is often likened to.

Where did Styracosaurus, a spiky-frilled cousin of Triceratops, carry its one long horn?

On its nose stood one tall horn, and adults had no brow horns to speak of: the mirror image of Triceratops, with its short nose horn and long brow horns. The two sit on separate branches of the horned-dinosaur family.