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Animals · Giants of the past

Triceratops

Triceratops horridus

Three horns and a bony frill

A thirty-foot adult with its bony frill flared and two brow horns pointing forward.
A thirty-foot adult with its bony frill flared and two brow horns pointing forward.
  • Status: Extinct
  • Fossils in western North America, especially Wyoming and Colorado
  • Extinct

Numbers

Weight
7 tonover 7 tons in T. horridus; estimated between 7 and 11 tons for the genus
Length
30 ft26 to 30 feet in estimates for the genus
Height
10 ftrefers to the largest T. horridus specimens
Lifespan
69 million years agoLate Cretaceous, late Maastrichtian: lived between 69 and 66 million years ago
Brow horns
3 ftcould exceed three feet
Maximum estimated weight
11 tonupper limit of estimates for the genus
Last of the dinosaurs
66 yearsamong the last known non-avian dinosaurs

Ten fun facts

  1. the first fossil that we now attribute to this animal was mistaken for the horns of a giant bison.

  2. the skulls found are all different from one another because they belong to individuals of different ages and sexes.

  3. a cowboy tried to recover a skull by throwing a lasso around a horn, which snapped clean off.

  4. between 1889 and 1891, a single fossil hunter named John Bell Hatcher collected thirty-one skulls.

  5. the species name horridus does not mean horrible; in Latin it means rough, describing the skull surface.

  6. seventeen different species were assigned to it throughout history, but only two are accepted today.

  7. its massive four-legged body resembles that of a rhinoceros, but the two creatures are not related.

  8. in 2010, some researchers proposed that Torosaurus was simply an adult Triceratops, an idea that remains contested.

  9. specimens of every age have been found, from tiny hatchlings to fully grown mature adults.

  10. it lived until the extinction sixty-six million years ago and is among the last known non-avian dinosaurs.

The quiz answers

Five questions about this animal. Pick an answer and find out if it is the right one.

Question 1 of 5

How many horns did it have on its skull?

Question 2 of 5

When did it go extinct?

Question 3 of 5

What were the horns and frill used for according to recent hypotheses?

Question 4 of 5

What animal was its first fossil mistaken for?

Question 5 of 5

How many species of this genus are considered valid today?

Try it yourself

Experiment 1

Unroll a tape measure to thirty-nine inches and hold it vertically in front of your face: that is the length of just one brow horn.

Experiment 2

Thirty feet is the length of an adult. Measure it on the gym floor and count how many long steps you need to cover it.

Experiment 3

Seven tons is about fourteen thousand pounds. Check the weight of your family car and calculate how many cars it takes to reach that.

Data from Wikidata (Q3998678) and Wikipedia (Triceratops horridus).