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It\u2019s time to learn about some more dinosaurs, ceratopsids, including the well-known Triceratops!\n\nTriceratops:\n\n\n\nAn artist\u2019s frankly awesome rendition of Sinoceratops. I love it:\n\n\n\nA Kosmoceratops skull:\n\n\n\nPachyrhinosaurus had a massive snoot:\n\n\n\nProtoceratops:\n\n\n\nFighting dinos!\n\n \n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nBack in episode 107, about ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, I mentioned that one day I\u2019d do an episode all about triceratops and its relations. Well, that day is today. It\u2019s the ceratopsid episode!\n\nCeratopsids are a family of dinosaurs with elaborate horns on their faces and frills on the back of their heads. They almost all lived in what is now North America and most of them lived in the late Cretaceous. Triceratops is the most well known, so we\u2019ll start with it.\n\nThe name triceratops, of course, means three face horns, and it did indeed have three face horns. It had one on its nose and two on its brow, plus a frill that projected from the back of its skull.\n\nTriceratops was a big animal, around 10 feet high at the shoulder, or 3 meters, and about 30 feet long, or 9 meters. Its body was bulky and heavy, sort of like a rhinoceros but, you know, even bigger and more terrifying.\n\nLike the rhinoceros, triceratops was a herbivore. It had a horny beak something like a turtle\u2019s that it probably used to grab plant material, and it had some 40 teeth on each side of the jaw. These teeth were replaced every so often as the old ones wore down, sort of like crocodilians do. Back when triceratops lived, around 68 million years ago, grass hadn\u2019t developed yet. There were prairies in parts of western North America the same way there are today, but instead of grass, the prairies were covered in ferns. Many researchers think triceratops mostly ate ferns, grazing on them the same way bison graze on grass today.\n\nIn fact, the first paleontologist to study a triceratops fossil thought it was an extinct type of bison. This was a man called Othniel Charles Marsh. To his credit, Marsh only had a little piece of a triceratops skull to examine, the piece with the brow horns. And since the brow horns of a triceratops do look a little like the horn cores of a bovid, and since this was 1887 before a lot was known about dinosaurs, and since the fossil was found in Colorado where the buffalo roam, it\u2019s understandable that Marsh would have assumed he was looking at a gigantic fossil bison skull. He figured it out the following year after examining another skull with the nose horn intact, since bovids are not known for their nose horns, and he naturally named it Triceratops.\n\nIt\u2019s tempting to assume that Triceratops was a herd animal, but we don\u2019t have any evidence that it lived in groups. It was common and we have lots of fossil triceratops, especially the thick-boned skulls, but it seems to have mostly been a solitary animal.\n\nIt\u2019s pretty obvious that the triceratops\u2019 horns must have been for defense. It lived at the same time as Tyrannosaurus rex, which preyed on triceratops often enough that we have a lot of Triceratops fossils with T rex tooth marks in the bones. We also have some triceratops fossils with T rex tooth marks in the bones that show signs of healing, indicating that the triceratops successfully fended off the T rex and lived. But what was the frill for?\n\nResearchers have been trying to figure this out for years. There were a lot of different ceratopsid species, many of which may have overlapped in range and lived at the same time, so some researchers suggest the frill\u2019s size and shape may have helped individuals find mates of the same species. Triceratops has a rather plain frill compared to many ceratopsid species, which had frills decorated with points, spikes, scalloped edges, lobes, and other ornaments.\n\nBut the ornamental elements of the frills change rapidly through the generations,