All extinct animals receive a tomb in another dimension. Today, we will visit the monument that celebrates and keeps the memory of one of these jewels of evolution: the ceratopsians. A very successful group of dinosaurs that lived and died during the Cretaceous period.
Some of the most emblematic species were immortalized here. We are the first to visit this exhibition, which has been patiently waiting for us for 66 million years. At its center, one of the most powerful and iconic dinosaurs of all time.
An animal that has fueled the imagination of people of all ages for more than a century. The time has come to meet the real king of the dinosaurs. This is the life of the triceratops.
Welcome to Hell's Creek. That night, the home of some of the last dinosaurs on the planet goes up in flames, scaring away the herds and claiming lives. But this is just another night here.
In the morning, the animals return to explore the newly opened scenery. It may seem counterintuitive, but large herbivores benefit from fire. In a few weeks, the ash fertilizes the soil of the clearings formed, giving space to dense pastures of ferns and cannabaceous plants.
Fire is an important element in this ecosystem, making the landscape less homogeneous, which allows the existence of a variety of colossal herbivores. One of the most abundant is also one of the largest. Triceratops was a North American dinosaur, having lived from Mexico to Canada.
What is today a dry, scorching desert was a humid, densely vegetated and diverse environment in every way. Angiosperms, flowering plants, were dominating the world for the first time, experiencing an explosion of diversity and transforming environments, in what we call the Cretaceous terrestrial revolution. These new plants were selecting for new types of herbivores, such as hadrosaurs and ceratopsids.
North America was divided by a large inland sea, known as the Western Inland Sea, and Laramidia was one of two landmasses that emerged from that sea. This is often referred to as “the most dangerous sea in history” for its abundance of giant marine reptiles like Mosasaurs and super-predatory fish like Xiphactinus. The other land mass was called Appalachia, located east of the Western Inland Sea.
Laramidia was an area rich in diverse fauna and flora, including a wide variety of dinosaurs. But in the Mastrichtian, when Triceratops lived, this sea was already retreating, as North America rose, bringing together the two large land masses to the north, although to the south, they were already connected. Its fossils are found in a number of geological formations, in Hell creek they are particularly abundant.
The name, in literal translation, means stream of hell, and here, some of the best-known dinosaurs lived today. In addition to Triceratops, the heaviest land predator of all time lived there: Tyrannosaurus rex. And the giant hadrosaur, Edmontosaurus.
The Hell Creek Formation is a geological layer that extends across the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, in the United States. It is one of the most famous geological formations of the Late Cretaceous period, dating approximately 66 to 68 million years ago. Its rocks were deposited in river and lake environments, which ran from the continent to the continental sea.
These conditions have allowed the preservation of a variety of fossils, including dinosaur bones, teeth, eggs and tracks, as well as plants and other animals. It is especially significant for the study of the last stages of dinosaurs before the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous. It is from here that many of the most complete and well-preserved triceratops came from.
The genus Triceratops is home to two species: triceratops prorsus and triceratops horridus. His name means face with three horns. Prorsus had a longer nasal horn, a shorter face, and horns positioned higher on the skull.
However, they had very similar sizes and habits, and they coexisted. Both species of the genus Triceratops had a lot of individual variation, both in size as in format. The shape, size and direction of the horns, for example, was one of the most unique characteristics of each individual, and could be an important form of communication between them, indicating sex, health, age and history.
Each triceratops was unique. Perhaps this individual variation was also true in other aspects of their appearance in life, such as their colors. This makes species delimitation difficult, and several others have already been proposed, but only Prorsus and horridus are considered valid taxa.
Imagine an elephant, 2 tons heavier, with an even larger head, an immense shield around its head and two horns instead of two ivory teeth. This must be what it felt like to see a triceratops in life. Weighing 6-8 tons, with the largest males when well fed weighing up to 10 tons, it was one of the largest non-sauropod dinosaurs to ever walk the earth.
It was not that long for its weight, measuring 7 meters from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail, but unlike saurischian dinosaurs, with light, hollow bones like birds, Triceratops had a dense and robust skeleton. With immense areas of muscular attachment, we realized that this animal was a living tank, with the back of a Beetle. Its wide hips, short trunk, robust neck and thick legs immediately demonstrate that this is an animal built for strength and endurance, not for speed.
Its head is one of the largest in relation to its body in any dinosaur, and we will soon see that it is much more complex than it seems. Its enormous weight brought the animal's center of gravity forward, even so, its body was so massive that the tail, which in many animals has the function of counterweight, was virtually useless for this purpose. Its tails are short compared to most dinosaurs, although it could still store fat and help regulate the animal's body temperature.
Its super iconic and easily recognizable look made it the second best-known dinosaur to the general public, behind only Tyrannosaurus, its arch-enemy. Together, they form the pair of antagonists most represented in pop culture and cinema, immortalizing their relationship between predator and prey, almost always leaning on the side of the tyrannosaurus. But let's see today, that triceratops was not a helpless piece of meat, but a formidable opponent for any predator that dared to challenge it.
Especially after the sick triceratops scene in Jurassic Park, it's easy to find plastic toys of something that resembles a triceratops anywhere. Triceratops is one of the best-known dinosaurs in the fossil record. Their remains can be found in many different places, more than 130 individuals may have already been collected by science, with at least 50 of them being considerably complete.
Fortunately, the physical characteristics of triceratops favored its preservation during the last 66 million years. Its giant, dense and robust bones have proven resistant to time. Especially the skull, giant, massive and dense, took a long time to decompose in the open air, and favored the precipitation of minerals when buried.
It was named by Charles Marsh in 1889, during the Bone Wars with his arch-enemy Edward Cope, to see who could describe the most spectacular dinosaurs. The first known bone recovered was a skull roof with horns, which was initially thought to be that of a giant bison, but when more complete fossils were unearthed, it was realized that it was a new and entirely different animal. Triceratops was part of one of the last groups of dinosaurs to evolve during the Mesozoic, the ceratopsines.
When I say ceratopsines, I'm referring to the ceratopsians of the triceratops family and their closest relatives, which we'll get to know below. The ancestors of ceratopsines were bipeds, like Psittacosaurus, although it is not the ancestor of ceratopsians, but rather a representative of a lineage that did not leave descendants until the end of the Cretaceous. We know that Psittacosaurus had a series of bristles sticking out from the base of its tail, which makes it quite reasonable to assume that Triceratops did as well.
Representing the protoceratopsines, very common in Asia, we have protoceratops, a small animal, but one of the first forms to return to the quadrupedal posture in the ceratopsines. Another basal family of ceratopsines are the leptoceratopsids, characterized by the absence of horns on the face, but giant beaks, extremely curved jaws and frightening heads like that of Udanoceratops. Ceratopsine dinosaurs are characteristic of the Cretaceous, although they appeared during the end of the Jurassic.
Ceratopsids, from the innermost family of Triceratops, are divided into two groups: the centroaurines and the chasmosaurines. Among the centrosaurines we have Centrosaurus, Styracosaurus, Pachyrhinosaurus, Diabloceratops, Albertaceratops and Nasutoceratops, among others. Chasmosaurines include Chasmosaurus, Pentaceratops, Torosaurus and the most famous of all: Triceratops.
All Ceratopsines, that is: psittacosaurids, leptoceratopsids, protoceratopsids and ceratopsids, are part of a large group of ornithischian dinosaurs called marginocephalians. The closest marginalocephalic dinosaurs to the ceratopsines are the pachycephalosaurs. Known for being bipedal, herbivorous, big-headed and quarrelsome, these animals share many characteristics with the ceratopsines, from their teeth and the presence of a small beak, as well as the thick head full of bony ornaments around it.
Instead of horns and a shield, pachycephalosaurs have a thick dome and rough, pointed bony projections around the skull and above the snout, presumably used in sexual display and interspecific contests. Marginocephalic dinosaurs in general, but especially ceratopsids, are very characteristic of Asia and North America, where they appear to have evolved, diversified and became extinct. It is possible that due to the relative geographic isolation of our continent at the time, they never arrived here in South America, where the dominant herbivores were sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs.
While countries like China, Russia, Canada, the United States and Mexico are exploding with fossils of this type of dinosaur, they are practically non-existent in other parts of the globe. It is difficult to say whether an extinct animal was solitary or lived in groups, we generally infer gregarious behavior from skeletons found together, as is common in Styracosaurus, Centrosaurus, Torosaurus, among other close relatives of Tricerarops. Apparently, in general, ceratopsids were animals that roamed in groups, a tendency that we have discovered to be increasingly common among dinosaurs.
While this is true, for triceratops, this is a bit more complicated. Around 50 solitary skeletons have been found, and only one aggregation of just 3 young individuals, described in 2005. Although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, this may suggest that Triceratops had a much more solitary lifestyle than most.
of the ceratopsids. Perhaps its immense size protected it as much as numbers protect packs of smaller animals. Even so, it was a very abundant animal and it is possible that they stayed together when young, or formed smaller flocks during adulthood, which by chance, were never preserved together.
It has been suggested that they form small groups of 5-10 adults, which would make them even more protected. Or perhaps they roamed alone throughout their adult lives, forming large concentrations during the breeding season. If true, these may have been extremely territorial and violent animals, ready to defend their piece of land even at the cost of their lives or that of anyone who challenged them.
This colossal head was armed with the three horns that give Triceratops its name. When we look at a fossilized skull, the part we see of the horn is just the innermost structure, we must consider that in life, there was a keratin covering that made it much larger. This is also true in modern-day animals, whose skeletons seem to suggest a much smaller horn than in life.
Cowboy horns are made from the outermost keratinous part of the horns. oxen, for example, which can have quite eccentric shapes. With triceratops, this was no different.
In addition to the direction and size of the horn being an indicator of the animal's age, sex and health, there apparently was a lot of individual variation in the horns of Triceratops. Each adult had a visibly different, unique pair that could grow slowly throughout its life, with older ones sporting exaggeratedly long horns. And we have evidence that these horns were not just used to communicate with individuals of the same species or attract females, they had a powerful defensive and offensive function.
As much as the horns attract attention, they are not the most unique and peculiar feature of this animal, as they exist in different forms in mammals, having evolved convergently, completely independent of the horns of any dinosaur. What appears not to have occurred in any other animal group is the shield or bony frill that extends from the back of the skull. The triceratops shield is quite basic when compared to that of other ceratopsids, mainly Chasmosaurineans, with large, heavily ornamented shields.
Each species had a different type of shield that seems to have also interfered with their forms of combat. But their outrageous and extravagant forms have all the characteristics of a trait sculpted by sexual selection. Most have very large parietal fenestrae, openings that make the structure lighter, but the triceratops shield was completely closed, short and thick.
Decorated with more superficial ossifications called osteoderms, they feature large grooves that, in life, may have supported veins that carried blood to the region, indicating that it was highly vascularized and possibly played a role in the thermal regulation of these warm-blooded animals. Increasing or decreasing blood flow in the shield, a large surface in contact with the atmosphere, may have been important for heating or cooling this animal, in a similar way to the large ears of an African elephant. Furthermore, this shield made it difficult to access the animal's neck, where its predators could preferentially target.
We can see that in addition to protection, heat exchange and sexual display, the functions of this structure could be very diverse, otherwise such a wide variety of forms would not have evolved. Triceratops' paws were very different from how they are usually represented in the media, round, like an elephant's. The back and front legs were quite different from each other, but both supported 4 toes that were spread out on the ground, meaning that it was not built for speed, but rather for resistance and traction.
The hind legs are robust and all fingers have claws. The front legs closely resembled a psittacosaurus hand, with a fifth finger that didn't touch the ground and just three fingers with nails that formed a small hoof. Those front legs went through a tremendous evolutionary rollercoaster, since the ancestors of all tetrapods were quadrupedal, but the ancestors of dinosaurs were bipedal, so all quadrupedal dinosaurs, like the ceratopsids, are actually secondarily quadrupedal.
We realize this when we go back to the lineages closest to the ceratopsids, such as psittacosaurids and pachicephalosaurids, which are bipedal animals. Triceratops was not an especially intelligent dinosaur, although it may have been smarter than people realize. Most dinosaurs carry an image of being slow and dumb, capable of little , cognitively speaking.
However, the fact that they had a complex, perhaps hierarchical, social life and a good spatial sense of their territory indicates that they are not that dumb after all. Analysis of its brain, relatively small for its size, showed that its sense of smell may have been one of the worst among all dinosaurs. Furthermore, the position and shape of their inner ear indicates an animal very sensitive to low-frequency sounds, which could mean that, like elephants, they communicated in the distance with deep sounds that cut through the forest.
The balance position of the head was a 45-degree inclination that, at the same time as pointing the beak downwards, facilitating grazing, pointed the horns forward, against any threat. Even though the male was larger than the female on average, as can be demonstrated by mature skulls of smaller stature, the female Triceratops was not that different from the male. When the male and female of a species are very different, we say it is a species with a high degree of sexual dimorphism.
It is possible that there were differences in color, just as there are subtle differences in the shape of the horns, for example, but in general, an adult female would be as capable of defending herself as a male. To withstand such a violent life, this animal had thick skin. The generosity of the fossil record allowed science to discover some examples of triceratops skin markings, showing that it did not have smooth skin like that of an elephant, but rather covered in polygonal scales, with spaced osteoderms, punctuating the entire body.
Unfortunately, there are still no studies that have managed to find in these skin samples evidence of melanosomes, small pigment-bearing cells, fossilized in exceptional conditions of preservation that allow us to infer the color of the skin of an extinct animal in life. However, we have good reason to imagine that at least the triceratops shield carried quite bright and extravagant colors. In addition to the high vascularization of the region, we know that the wide variety of shield shapes among the ceratopsids is an indication that female preference played a role in the selection of these shapes, and of course, colors help a lot, if the big question is to have an eye-catching structure.
Current dinosaurs have a very high and sophisticated perception of colors and often have very strong colors and psychedelic patterns, there is no reason to think that dinosaurs would be different, especially the ceratopsids. Triceratops was not a specialist or demanding herbivore, far from it. This was an animal capable of feeding on an immense variety of resources, from roots to the ferns, cycas and creeping angiosperms that grew in North America.
Interestingly, one of the most common plants in Hell Creek were cannabaceous plants, from the cannabis family, which certainly fed triceratops and a variety of other herbivorous animals. Triceratops' only limitation was the height of its food, as it was certainly unable to reach the treetops, despite being able to knock down smaller trees to feed on the leaves. But the chance of triceratops eating only vegetables is very minimal.
An animal of its size and with such a dense and ostentatious skeleton would certainly supplement its diet with small carcasses and skeletons of large animals. This is because plants are poor in many of the minerals most necessary for building bones, such as calcium. This habit is relatively common in modern herbivores, we call it osteophagy.
This would make Triceratops an omnivore, mostly herbivorous, but an opportunistic scavenger, which would hardly do without at least a little meat and bones. Its jaw, teeth and beak support this hypothesis, as they seem adapted to a highly fibrous diet. There is much debate about the presence or absence of cheeks in Triceratops, a question that remains open until preserved skin from this part of the face is found.
The curved beak has nothing to do with parrot beaks, for example, as they are another very separate lineage of dinosaurs, which means the similarity is due to an evolutionary convergence. We have evidence in other ceratopsids that this beak could be covered not just by keratin, but by a pattern of skin similar to the body. Its function in life was to cut fibrous plants and pull roots from the earth with tremendous force .
The teeth, with a peculiar triangular shape, were organized in batteries, constantly replaced, indicating that they were capable of processing very hard vegetable matter, and even bones, although they didn't chew exactly like mammals. Many aspects of Triceratops reproduction were unknown and completely speculative. Copulation does not seem as complicated as in other dinosaurs, however, until recently , nests of ceratopsid dinosaurs were not known.
Those attributed to them were often confused with actually being theropod eggs like oviraptors. To explain this, it had even been proposed that they could give birth to offspring, in a convergent evolution with mammals. However, new discoveries have revealed the reason for the apparent absence of eggs from these animals in the fossil record: like pterosaurs, their eggs were leathery, that is, they had a leathery texture, rather than being fully mineralized like bird eggs.
This means they are fragile, decompose quickly and do not fossilize easily . But there is a chance that they were careful and overprotective parents. This was an animal that underwent significant transformations, mainly in its skull, during development.
Instead of being born a miniature adult that only gains size, the shape of the face, horns and shield changed over time, making its sex and age obvious. In addition to bone remodeling, there is a chance that colors will also change throughout their growth, with some being a clear sign of maturity and health. The horns, in youth, were curved backwards, and as they matured, they ended up bending forwards.
Many fossils belonging to almost all stages of the Triceratops' life have already been unearthed, allowing scientists to create a faithful portrait of the stages of its development. Some of them were initially treated as new species, as they were so different from the adult triceratops, but research involving microscopic details of the bone tissue showed that they were juvenile phases of the life of a larger animal. This whole story involving the complex ontology of triceratops motivated even more radical proposals, such as that of paleontologist Jack Horner, who proposed that Torosaurus, a species of ceratopsid similar in size to triceratops and which lived with it, was actually the last stage of development of triceratops.
This is because Torosaurus has a longer shield, with two large fenestrae, which make it the owner of the largest skull that has ever lived on the continents of planet Earth. According to Horner's hypothesis, as it aged, the triceratops shield lengthened and gained two holes, a characteristic pattern of Torosaurus. But factors such as the lack of transitional stages, other differences between species and geographic distribution incompatible with the hypothesis, debunked this idea, and Torosaurus remains a separate species, as incredible as Triceratops.
Although rarer. Disputes between triceratops and other species, especially its predator, were common. We know this because many triceratops skulls bear the marks of these fights.
Bite marks are found, both on the shield and on the vertebrae, ribs and femur of the triceratops, that can be directly attributed to Tyrannosaurus rex. Some of these marks show signs of healing, indicating that the animal survived the predation attempt, while others, without any healing, clearly reveal the cause of the animal's death. These marks show that the hip and shield were the most targeted parts.
Horn marks from other triceratops are also found, mainly on the side of the face and shield, with some extreme examples of open holes, which correspond to the width of a horn from another adult individual. A sign that these disputes were frequent and bloodthirsty. To understand Triceratops, it is necessary to look at Tyrannosaurus rex, because most likely, one would not exist without the other.
It is no coincidence that the heaviest land predator of all time and one of the most heavily armed herbivores in the history of life cohabited the same ecosystem. One shaped the other in a dramatic evolutionary arms war over millions of rounds of life and death. The relationship between predator and prey is one of the most influential evolutionary forces in nature, and the presence of a 12-meter-long predator terrorizing Hell Creek certainly explains an important part of the Triceratops' life.
Tyrannosaurus rex was an intelligent and sophisticated predator, despite its brute strength, and therefore would not have often hunted adults alone. We've gotten used to seeing Triceratops always losing to Tyrannosaurus. But a one-on-one confrontation could have any result.
Tyrannosaurus's bite, adapted to break bones, could leave a triceratops without the movement of its hind legs, if it hit the right spot on its spine. The Triceratops' horns can easily tear the rex off the ground with their immense strength. This is a battle that has been repeated millions of times on this planet, and this is the last of them.
The extinction of most species of non-avian dinosaurs that ever existed was caused by environmental, ecological, climatic changes. . .
But not Triceratops, as well as all dinosaurs that still existed 66 million years ago. The cause of the definitive disappearance of these last non-avian dinosaurs was extraterrestrial. They existed and thrived on the worst day in the history of planet Earth: the impact that created the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
One day, triceratops was one of the dominant species in North America, the next, not so. If there were survivors of the impact, shock wave, heat wave, tsunamis, earthquakes and rain of molten rock spheres that caused global fires, they did not last long. Their fate was to suffocate in the cloud of smoke that blocked sunlight, or to die of starvation in a world in which all the world's forests turned to ashes overnight.
It happened during spring in the Northern Hemisphere, a crucial and delicate moment for the reproductive cycle of many animals and plants. We don't know how much longer Triceratops might have lasted if the impact had never occurred, or what its descendants would have looked like. Would ceratopsids even larger than it and Torosaurus be a reality?
We will never know, because this event put an end to all ceratopsid lineages. This video is the result of more than 6 months of work by the ABC Terra team of paleoartists. A huge thank you to Lucas Mateus, whose unbelievable talent was able to bring these animals back to life, in the 3D animations you just saw.
They were sounded by Pedro Miguel, thanks Pedro! The fantastic illustrations of our triceratops are works by the very talented Heitor de Sá, to whom I am also very grateful. To learn more about the process and stay up to date with how it was all done, become a member of the channel to watch the Making off of “The Life of Triceratops”, and I guarantee you will be surprised.
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