Gregarious gangsters

A new fossil find suggests that young Triceratops dinosaurs were gregarious gangsters, not solitary types.

Mounted version of one of the juvenile Triceratops skulls from Hell Creek Formation in Montana.
Credit: enginestudio.org

Three juvenile Triceratops, a species thought to be solitary, died together in a flood and now have been found in a 66 million-year-old bone bed in Montana, lending more evidence to the idea that teen dinosaurs were gregarious gangsters.

Triceratops were ceratopsids, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived until the the very end of the Cretaceous Period. They have been found in enormous bone beds of multiple individuals, but all known Triceratops fossils up to now have been solitary individuals.

In fact, Triceratops is one of the best-known of all dinosaurs, with more than 50 total specimens discovered, so it looked pretty certain that they were anti-social and avoided hanging out with their own kind.

However, the new discovery of a jumble of at least three juveniles in the famous Hell Creek Formation suggests that the three-horned Triceratops were social, or at least the juveniles were, revealing something about their behavior — a feature that is notoriously hard to discern from fossils.

Read more at Gang of Juvenile Dinosaurs Discovered.