Was Triceratops Truly A Tyrannosaurus Killer?

Triceratops was a gigantic chasmosaurine, a group of ceratopsians with long frills and brow horns. It lived in Late Cretaceous North America and was one of the most formidable herbivores in its ecosystem at 5 to 8 tonnes as an adult. It lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex, the most powerful theropod known to science. Media often portrays the battle between Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus as very one-sided, whether that be Triceratops easily repulsing the predator or Tyrannosaurus casually taking down the tank of an herbivore. What does the fossil record indicate about the combat that happened between Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus, and what do paleontologists have to say about it? This video includes a sneak peek at groundbreaking research on ceratopsian agility being done by graduate student Kyle Atkins-Weltman, along with input from theropod biomechanics expert Eric J. Snively.

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SOURCES

Horner et al. 2011 found that Triceratops made up 40% of the dinosaur fauna in Hell Creek. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016574

First Triceratops bonebed
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20491089?seq=2

Tyrannosaurus feeding on a Triceratops pelvis, postmortem https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.1996.10011297

We know Tyrannosaurus actively hunted hadrosaurs
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1216534110

Trikes likely used horns for intraspecific combat (Farke et al. 2009; D’Anastasio 2022)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0004252
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08033-2

Adapted for hearing low frequencies; not adapted for rapid posture stabilization or side-to-side head movement (Sakagami and Kawabe 2020)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505063/

Likely a solitary animal with very rare group formations. Not known from bone beds like other ceratopsians
https://dinomuseum.ca/2019/01/a-day-in-the-life-of-triceratops#:~:text=The%20differences%20between%20the%20two,and%20a%20shorter%2C%20deeper%20snout.

Triceratops survived getting bitten on the horns by a T.rex
https://www.myfossil.org/featured-fossil-triceratops-vs-tyrannosaurus/

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