Now Part of the Gang

I'm sure my fellow dinosaur enthusiasts recognize this magnificent fellow, as depicted by classic paleo-artist, Charles Knight . In fact, Triceratops is one of the best-known of all Cretaceous dinosaurs, with more than fifty specimens discovered.

Until very recently most scientists believed that these thirty foot long three-horned reptiles were anti-social, solitary creatures that wandered and forged alone. An exciting new discovery (to me, anyway) has some paleontologists convinced that they may have been quite wrong in this assumption. Certainly no shame in this. Paleontology is always evolving and reassessing itself; that's how science works, or, at least, how it should work.

Three juvenile Triceratops have been excavated in the ancient Late Cretaceous bone bed from the famous Hell Creek formation in Montana. The condition and position of the fossil skeletons seems to indicate that the young dinosaurs possibly drowned together as a result of flooding, common in this location laced at the time with flood plains and river channels. As dinosaur news goes, this is pretty major stuff.

The fact that the Triceratops trio died together lends evidence to a fairly new idea suggesting that some teenaged dinosaurs were gregariously social, possibly living in herds for protection from predators such as their fearsome contemporary Tyrannosaurus rex. With the exceptions of crocodiles and alligators, both actually distantly related to dinosaurs, no other known reptiles live in social groups.








The more we discover about dinosaurs, and their astonishingly long reign, the more complex and remarkable they become. Little wonder that they were the most diverse and successful terrestrial animals ever to live on the planet.

And, as a writer, creatively speaking, I'd be nothing without them.