Why did Triceratops and its relatives look so strange?
Triceratops had three horns on its face along with a huge bony frill that extended from the back of its head. It’s easy to picture the animal using the frill to block a predator’s lunge for its neck, or goring its attacker with one of its horns. But this picture is probably fiction. “Pretty much everybody rules out defense for the horns and frills,” Norell says. “They just weren’t sturdy enough, and we don’t find a lot of broken ones.” Ceratopsians put their best faces forward. Einiosaurus (left), Anchiceratops (middle), and Styracosaurus (right) were contemporaries about 70 million years ago. All three sported horns and frills that were once thought to be weapons for use in combat but which some paleontologists now theorize may have been identity badges that helped distinguish species.Paleontologists have had the same counterintuitive experience with Pachycephalosaurus, a bipedal plant eater with a dome of thick bone on its skull that was studded with knob-shaped outgrowths. Generatio
