Dino on display at natural history museum

Triceratops skeleton was gift to CU from the Smithsonian

A triceratops skeleton cast is on display for public viewing at the University of Colorado, the first time the university ever has had a full-scale dinosaur skeleton.

The triceratops exhibit represents the CU Museum of Natural History’s first dinosaur skeleton, measuring at 22 feet long and 9 feet wide. The reconstructed skeleton was a gift from the Smithsonian Museum.

“Everybody knows about triceratops,” Karen Chin, professor and curator of paleontology at the CU Museum, said in a statement. “But it’s not common in museums to see the whole animal. To see the scale of this dinosaur, and such a weird dinosaur, is very exciting.”

The skeletal reconstruction is a composite of several partial triceratops specimens found in Wyoming in the late 1800s. Scientists at the Smithsonian Museum first assembled these fossils into a single composite skeleton and displayed it in 1905. The skeleton at CU is a high-resolution cast of that skeleton, made from plastic, fiberglass and foam.

“Museums want to exhibit complete skeletons, but the chances of finding a perfect, pristine skeleton of these kinds of animals are exceedingly small,” Jaelyn Eberle, CU Museum curator of fossil vertebrates and professor, said in a statement.

Triceratops were herbivores that roamed Colorado 68 to 66 million years ago. A uniquely western animal, they were found throughout Colorado to western Canada.

A Colorado teacher discovered the first documented triceratops fossils, not much more than a pair of horns, near Denver in 1887. Paleontologist O.C. Marsh originally attributed the horns to an extinct giant relative of bison. Today, an adult female bison weighs around 1,000 pounds and is 7 to 10 feet in length, while a triceratops weighed 12,000 pounds or more and could reach up to 30 feet in length.

More complete fossils were discovered soon after the first fossils were discovered and Marsh named the new dinosaur triceratops, which means “threehorned face.”

This triceratops skeleton first arrived in Boulder in 2022, carefully delivered by truck from Washington D.C. A crew assembled it off-site before delivering it to CU, where the body, limbs and skull had to be rolled through the doors separately.

Members of the public can view the exhibit for free from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays in the lobby of the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex building at 4001 Discovery Drive.