MOST INTACT TRICERATOPS FOSSIL GOES ON DISPLAY
Nicknamed ‘Horridus’ after the species name Triceratops horridus, the fossil, which is about 85 per cent complete, made its public debut at the Melbourne Museum in Australia in a new exhibit last month.
Horridus was a herbivore, or plant-eating dinosaur, that lived during the Cretaceous period, and it grew to an impressive size. The fossil contains more than 260 bones and weighs more than 1,000 kilograms. It measures nearly seven metres long and stands over two metres tall.
The skull, which is 98 per cent complete, is tipped with two slender horns at the brow and a stubby horn atop the nose. The neck frill spans 1.5 metres, and the skull weighs about 261 kilograms.
Upon arriving at Melbourne Museum, fossil preparers measured, labelled and 3D-scanned each bone before the skeleton was assembled for display. While many articulated Triceratops skeletons are exhibited around the world, only Horridus and a handful of others are made of bones that came from one individual animal.
“This is the Rosetta Stone for understanding Triceratops,” said Erich Fitzgerald, a senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria. “This fossil comprises hundreds of bones, including a complete skull and the entire vertebral column, which will help us unlock mysteries about how this species lived 67 million years ago,” he said.