Brow horn anyone?
I’m holding a replica of a #Triceratops horn that goes above the eye. I don’t know if this was cast from a specific specimen or sculpted in the likeness of one (or created from an artist’s mind). Does anyone know by chance?
Ceratopsian horns have lots of grooves. These are where arteries and veins pressed into the born. They aren’t antlers, those are grown and shed every year, but true horns. They would have had a keratinous sheath around them, a covering akin to your fingernails. How thick and how long no one knows. I’ve seen impressions that appear to be only a tiny bit longer than the bone, but those aren’t in the literature. Not being a ceratopsian lad, I defer to anyone that can point me to some horn covering papers!
Those horns worked great offensively and defensively. Let’s talk offense first. Yes, they would have been intimidating to even the largest #Tyrannosaurus, which wants to eat in peace, not trade a bellyful of agony for a bite. A full-sized Triceratops was over 30’ long and weighed 10+ tons, think an elephant with a cooler tail but not as awesome front-end weaponry ;-). It did have a massive shield.
The horns likely were used as much, if not more, for intraspecific sparring as cross-order conflict. Grooves at the correct height for antagonstic horns to@have left them can be seen on some adult ceratopsian skulls, suggesting horns not only let you know what species to be hanging out with, but also which ones you needed to spar with to be King of the Hill.
Did they live akin to large herbivores today, in big female herds while the males wandered about? Or did males keep harems, spending their days charging at imagined offenders? Maybe small groups of families or similar -sized individuals? Tis fascinating to me to conjecture what kind of lifestyles these beauties had. Is there convergent behavioral evolution we can pick up in the track record?
This neat horn is at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum in Nevada, a fun place to spend a few hours, to spend your winnings!
#FossilCrates #TriceratopsTuesday
Fossil Crates