One thing mostly paleoartists and some paleontologists have mostly agreed recently is that Triceratops was a herd animal. Many modern scientific illustrations show Triceratops traveling across floodplains in massive herds and many paleontologists have put forth the idea, that Triceratops may have clustered together to protect their vulnerable young. However is this in fact wrong?
Up until, recently, nearly all fossils of Triceratops were found alone, unassociated with any other fossils from the same species, so paleontologists thought they lived solitary lives or in small groups, often portrayed early paleoart. Fossils recently found at sites from the Hell Creek Formation in places like Montana have in fact revealed bone beds of a few adults which died in close proximity with several smaller juveniles. Many modern-day paleontologists have interpreted this as evidence that Triceratops lived in herds. However, there could be a lot of explanations to this discovery. For example, it could have been a flash flood or the gradual deposition of fossils in streams and rivers. Until we have more conclusive evidence, we just can't know for sure either way.
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| Herd animal?? |
So moving on, how fast was Triceratops? In many illustrations from the early 20th century, when the science of paleontology was still relatively new, Triceratops was often depicted as a slow-moving animal, similar to a hippopotamus, living in prehistoric swamps or damp forests. It was also shown as being lazy and quite lethargic. However, this view has changed over the last 60 years or so.
Many paleontologists now think Triceratops was quite fast. Although it did not sprint, it still lumbered across the ground at moderate speeds. Many paleontologists have used fossil trackways as well as finger bone fossils of Triceratops to calculate its overall speed. What many of them have found is that Triceratops's speed is comparable to that of a modern-day rhinoceros, around 34 miles/55 kilometers per hour. That is quite fast! So what does this mean? In many of the older illustrations, Triceratops is shown as being too slow to combat an attacking predatory dinosaur.
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| Could Triceratops outrun a vicious predatory like T-Rex?? |
However, it is now, though, that a dinosaur like Tyrannosaurus rex would have had to have been incredibly quick to bring down one of these horned beasts. In fact, fossil bone marks suggest, that Triceratops actually killed Tyrannosaurus rex by injuring it, more than Tyrannosaurus rex actually killed Triceratops, making "three horned reptile" one of the most dangerous land animals of all time. There is actually no evidence suggesting that Tyrannosaurus rex actually ever brought down a full-grown Triceratops.
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| The duel of fates or just sensationalistic misconception? |
Triceratops was most common in the tropical forest and delta, which deposited the Hell Creek Formation, which is about 67 to 66 million years old, which it shared with Tyrannosaurus. So aside from Triceratops, wasn't T-Rex the king of the Late Cretaceous. Fossils of a giant relative of Deinonychus and Velociraptor suggests otherwise. About 18 feet long, the Dakotaraptor, if hunting in packs, may have been serious competition for Tyrannosaurus rex, meaning that many of the old illustrations of the Late Cretaceous may have been missing an equally terrifying predator.
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| Dakotrarptor steini, the terror of the Late Cretaceous?? |
Again, Triceratops lived from 68 million to a little more than 66 million years ago, meaning it was only around for a little less than 2 million years or the last 5% of the Late Cretaceous. Although two million years seems like forever compared to our Gregorian Calendar, it is an incredibly short period in geologic time. So what does this have to do with Triceratops, and how does it make many of our assumptions about Triceratops wrong?
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| Triceratops lived near the very end of the "age of dinosaurs" |
In many illustrations and even in some museum diorama, Triceratops is portrayed with living alongside a plethora of different Cretaceous dinosaurs. One dinosaur often portrayed as living alongside with Triceratops is the ornithopod, Parasaurolophus. However, this is very inaccurate. Parasaurolophus lived from about 76.5 to 74.5 million years ago, in what is now Canada and Montana, the same place Triceratops would have roamed around during the end of the Cretaceous. However, Parasaurolophus had been well extinct for six million years before the earliest known Triceratops lived. The same follows for many other ornithopods such as Lambeosaurus and Corythosaurus, which lived at the same time as Parasaurolophus, but were extinct by the time of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
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| Parasaurlophus did NOT live alognside Triceratops |
So how many species of Triceratops were there?? It was originally thought that there were at least 16 different species of Triceratops, however as the science of paleontology slowly improved, we now know there are only two species, Triceratops horridus and Triceratops prorsus, both which lived at the same time. The main differences were that T. horridus was larger and had a slightly more elongated form, while T. prorsus was smaller and had a longer nose horn than that of T. horridus, as well as straighter, shorter brow horns.
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| A sketch of a Triceratops prorsus skull |
The study of Triceratops also raised some problematic questions. Jack Horner, a paleontologist from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT insists that Triceratops is really just a juvenile stage of the larger ceratopsian dinosaur, Torosaurus. He argues using fossil skulls that as Triceratops grew, it skull and frill elongated and its lost its frill horns as well. Quite a few paleontologists jumped on the bandwagon of this theory, but other have used several pieces of evidence suggest otherwise.
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| Is this the skeleton of a distinct Torosaurus species or just a full-grown Triceratops |
For example, juvenile skeletons of both Triceratops and Torosaurus have been found and they are in fact different. Another is that paleontologists have found an "upper limit" to the size of Triceratops, about 9 meters long, while the upper size of Torosaurus is only about 8 meters long at the most. The question is still up for debate, but whether which side wins, the genus will still be named Triceratops. How? When two species are revealed to be the same, the scientific community usually uses the name for the supposed species which was discovered first. Triceratops was first officially named in 1889, while Torosaurus was named in 1891, meaning that Triceratops would be the genus name.
So as you see, paleontologists and geologists have been making wrong assumptions not only about Triceratops, but as many other prehistoric animals. This is not only limited to paleontology. Biologists, chemists, physicists, meteorologists, and astronomers have been making corrections on existing theories for the last century, and that's what science is really all about. If it were not for being wrong, what would be the point of all of it?
Sources
http://www.fossilguy.com/gallery/vert/dinosaur/triceratops/triceratops.htm
Triceratops facts
http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/t/triceratops.html
http://www.amnh.org/our-research/science-news/2009/was-triceratops-a-social-animal/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090324081431.htm
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/25/did-dakotaraptor-really-face-off-against-tyrannosaurus/
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