I'm a retired evolutionary biologist, and I think this video was absolutely terrific. Many thanks for your effort; it was well worth it, at least for the rest of us.
I just bought the book about the beautiful 85% complete Triceratops fossil skeleton mounted in Melbourne Museum last week. An easily digestible yet efficiently detailed read for all Triceratops fans and enthusiasts, I highly recommend it.
Triceratops is known for the three horns on its head. The two above the eyes were each about a meter in length, possibly longer thanks to a keratin sheath. It also sported a large frill, likely used as display and defense. Triceratops was a robust dinosaur, at 7-9 m in length and weighing up to 9 t. The skull was among the largest of any land animal, making up nearly a third of its entire length, the largest known measuring 2.5 m in length.
Great to have you back and it's been worth the wait. While I'm sure you've also had real life things going on it's also great to give an iconic Dinosaur the time and love it deserves. Well-structured and great narration, Visuals are so important to my enjoyment of things so your work is much appreciated. Images, active diagrams, videos and footage of contemporary comparisons, it makes your video so rich. I think I mentioned before and not that I was aiming criticism at the time, I said that as your channel grew your first investment should be in sound quality as your other techniques were already solid. This sound is so much better.
Thanks. I started during Covid recording voiceovers with my laptop mic under a duvet (like radio presenters were told to at the time). Now I have a proper microphone and software that can clean up the sound.
I'm glad you bring up the lack of sexual-dimorphism in Triceratops, because it's not just Trike. Even very well sampled genera like Centrosaurus & Styracosaurus we find no evidence of sexual-dimorphism that can't just be chalked up to ontogeny & or individual variation. This is unique to large Ceratopsids because in large ornithopods (Maiasaura) & Pachycephalosaurs (Stegoceros) they found evidence of more robust morphs with more injury damage. It makes me wonder if Ceratopsids had a colony bird-like breeding system where both sexes were selecting for the ornamentation on the other. This is just a theory, but it's interesting to ponder.
That is similar to what I argue. The evidence is that Triceratops used its horns for fighting other Triceratops, but both males and females had equally functional horns.
It's weird why Triceratops & its relatives just kinda took over western North America in the Maastrichtian, this is strange because before this Hadrosaurs were the dominate large herbivores in western North America. With Hadrosaurs making up a majority of the large herbivore population, seen in The Dinosaur Park & Oldman Formations. Even in the Asian Xingezhuang Formation that had a similar ecology to Hell's Creek but instead Sinoceratops was present Hadrosaurs still dominated the region. So there was something unique about the Triceratopsini tribe that made them able to completely dominate the ecology
It is a really complicated question. It may be something to do with the low rate of Triceratops herds in the fossil record. Small family herds used competition to keep the strongest males and females in a protective group, leaving less fit members to be solitary. This selected them for predator attacks when they were more vulnerable. This fitness of a protective group, the defensive abilities of Triceratops, and the vulnerability of ornithopods while Tyrannosaurus was dominant may have played a part. There are also so many factors that we don't think about and are not preserved in the fossil record.
I just subbed, these videos are great! I've never seen a dinosaur channel that has so much information (plus the narrators on the other channels can be very annoying.) Good work!
Dakotaraptor is in an unusual spot in more than one way, past fossil discoveries describes Raptors as starting out Large & as time went they tended to smaller sizes, that is until Dakotaraptor which is in reverse of all previous evidence.
It was certainly an outlier. Although not impossible, it was unusual and being a chimera of a raptor and a turtle makes sense to me in that context. I am very interested in what the raptor bones show. Whether it is a large raptor, or the turtle bones gave it size. We will just have to wait for the private collector, although they won't be thrilled if their Dakotaraptor turns out to be the size of a turkey.
American Bison can weigh well over a Ton, yet if you've ever seen Happy Bison (they exhibit this characteristic when led into new grazing fields), they can be Very light on their feet and gallop around like Antelope. Being large & heavy doesn't necessarily mean slow & plodding. Nice work on the video.
There's a very big difference between a 1 ton animal and a 7 tons animal ^^ When you grow in size, your weight grow by a cube, while your legs can only grow by a square. That means that quickly you're too big for your legs and you can't do what you were doing before. Like you said, a bison can gallop and frollick. An elephant that weighs 4 to 7 tons cannot.
Considering your analysis of SUP 9713, your comparison between standard chasmosaur and centrosaur horn layouts, and reconsideration that SUP's "large nasal horn" would have helped it survive, I have to say, the "three big horn" condition (or the "Agathaumas" condition, if you will) for certopsids kind of confuses me. How much would the horns get in the way of each other in terms of simply using them? Would power be dispersed like it would if you knocked multiple arrows? How long can the brow horns be until they start getting in the way of a long nasal horn's function, and vice versa (of course, assuming that they all point in vaguely the same direction, and the brow horns don't just try to do a funky Nasuceratops thing, or something even weirder)? Why is it that centrosaurs, with headgear more fit to lay on offense against tyrannosaurs, died out, while chasmosaurs survived, unless the defensive utility of their horns outweigh having to commit to offense? Are there an papers discussing these sorts of things?
I do not know of any papers expressly discussing this, but Andrew Farke's work seems to propose that the 'Agathaumas condition', as you put it, was better for fighting other Triceratops rather than fighting off predators. It seems that Triceratops reduced its predator offensive ability to greatly reduce its likelihood of killing other Triceratops in combat. This is also why the frill is solid (unusual for ceratopsians). It was a shield for the neck against horn stabs. It is better for a species if a boisterous young Triceratops gets taught a lesson and learns from it, than being killed from their first mistake.
I read a paper online a few months ago I caught in passing and didn't copy it's location or authors, but apparently it was placed in a bonafied research site (Nature, American Scientific, etc.?), that talked about the amount of what is known as JUNK DNA in a particular species and how long that species has been in existence gathering more Junk DNA along the Years. If there should be a sudden population decrease, even if it was just normal cycling, recessive Genes would start being seen in more & more, till the junk DNA just overwhelms the species & start succumbing to various genetic anomalies. It's believed the Mammoths of Wrangle Island Lost their sense of smell, which for them was OK, that is until it wasn't
While this is not my area of expertise, the so-called 'junk DNA' just sits around and is not evident in most members of a population, and can create innovative features when mutated or turned on. There was an example with a dolphin having pelvic fins due to 'junk DNA' from its ancestors being turned on. Any inherited trait can become dangerous if there is low genetic diversity to overcome the genetic issues. As far as my understanding is this is what happened to the Wrangle Island Mammoths, and it risks happening to cheetahs today.
Okay I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here regarding “the dinosaur decline “ hypothesis because 1) it assumes that the population trends seen in North America are representative of dinosaur diversity as a whole and kinda ignores the rest of world, what about the last 30 million years in Europe, or the last thirty million years in Asia, Africa, South America, we don’t hear about them. 2) whilst the American fossil sites are good they are Massively Biased towards larger animals meaning hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, and Ceratopsids are obviously going to get preserved more than other dinosaurs leading to a false perception of the ecosystem we see in terrestrial Lagerstättes in Asia that once you peel away this bias the average dinosaur is usually quite small with the giants being rare, also mind you that in terms of diversity hell creek proportionally has more small species of those ( as in dinosaurs that weigh less than a ton) than almost all other late Cretaceous American formations only beaten by dinosaur parks with at least 15 uncontroversial species and twenty if you add in the undiscribed, and potential species where as most Campanian and early Maastrichtian sites tend to have less than ten species and keep in mind this is like many different families, hardly grounds to lump them in as declining as well. 3) the cooling argument is also extremely questionable as if prince creek or the dozens of other fossil sites preserving both dinosaurs and cool environments don’t exist some of them being very close relatives to the animals in hell creek and and in the case of edmontosaurus the same exact genus, without issue, and if they’re sex was based of temperature the prince creek animals would have never existed there in the first place yet they did.
For most of your points: Exactly! Welcome to palaeontology. The Western North American environment is used because it has such a continuous record, not as apparent in Europe, Asia, etc. It is biased and we have to accept that working with what we have. It is difficult to correct bias when we do not know how much we are off by. We do our best with the data we have, and I hope I show that. All of the conclusions are open to critique. The cooling point is questionable, as it is a hypothesis (I hope I made that clear). The cooling in question was global cooling rather than regional. It would have occurred over millions of years and there were many dinosaurs suited for cooler climates than the western United States at the time. The argument is that the slow cooling wouldn't kill off the dinosaurs in those cold environments but put them under greater pressure. This is what I meant by 'killing them by degrees'. Thanks for your rant. I do enjoy reading rants about dinosaurs.
I always just kind of assumed that the frill was there to protect the ceratopsians neck. If its main predator was a t-rex, it just seems reasonable to me that it would evolve to protect itself from bites to the neck from above. All predators are gape limited, so if you have a structure that is larger than your predators bite and it's flat so the predator can't get purchase on it, you have yourself a pretty sold defensive structure, especially when you add some big pointy horns onto it.
Most ceratopsians had huge holes in their frills, making them into more display structures. Also Tyrannosaurus attack survivors generally had wounds to the back and hips. Its bite was so devastating it did not need to target vulnerable points like the neck. Triceratops’ frill seems to me be a defence from other Triceratops horns.
@ so I’m not arguing. It’s likely that I just am missing something, but if most survivors of t-Rex attacks weren’t to the neck, why isn’t that just evidence that the frill worked as a defense against attacks to the neck? (Google survivorship bias in ww2 planes to see what I mean) I don’t see your point there. Also, if the frill had holes in it, wouldn’t that be more likely to allow a long pointy object (such as another ceratopsians horn) to get through than a bite from a t-Rex? Again, I’m sure I’m just missing something here, but both your points seem more likely evidence for my point than yours.
First, I want to commend you for the WW2 airplane example. I was just thinking the same thing around the time I pressed send. The problem is that we have no other signs of bites that are definitely not feeding (apart from the Triceratops with the broken horn). Triceratops was specialised at fighting members of its own species, and so developed this additional defence for that. This was not the case for other ceratopsians, which would fight, but only if showing off their frill did not work. I said that Tyrannosaurus did not need to go for the neck because its bite was so strong. Dr David Hone has said that Triceratops’ frill is thinner than bone bitten through by Tyrannosaurus teeth. I mention in my Ankylosaurus video the lengths they went to develop Tyrannosaurus-proof armour. I understand that you are not arguing and I apologise if it came off that way. We can disagree as we are talking about the adaptations of extinct creatures. If there is anything more that I haven’t made clear, let me know.
@@palaeo_channel thanks for getting back to me! That makes a lot of sense. And no, you didn’t come off argumentative. I just always hedge my comments like that so that people know my questions are in good faith.
I like your comparison of rich people keeping dinosaur bones is like owning a ancient book you can’t read. Well I have a simple answer: books are cool and so are dinosaurs. It’s also a flex on poor people who can’t afford to buy dinosaurs.
Given Triceratops poor senses, but big fighting capacity, they were probably cooperating with other species for protection, no? Like a weak dinosaur but with keen eyesight and hearing that would alert them if there's a predator.
While a nice idea and theorised for some dinosaurs (thyreophorans and ornithopods) there is no evidence for it in Triceratops' case. Triceratops is often found being solitary rather than alongside other dinosaurs. Ornithopod increase had a negative impact on them due to the availability of food. Ankylosaur increase helped all herbivores by offering a predator deterrent (the true fighters), but their senses were poor too. It seems that ornithopods had the early warning systems, while ceratopsians and ankylosaurs did not, and they were not working together to solve that.
I cannot think of any animal that uses a gallop or sprint as their usual form of movement. I do personally not think you needed to clarify that trikes were not constantly sprinting around the place like 5yr olds that have gotten into the red cordial.
@palaeo_channel I checked and, humorously, it was the exact study that determined Triceratops to have a not so acute sense of smell lol. I should've clarified the results, as I remembered, found Triceratops to have great sensitivity to low frequency sounds
T. horridus was the younger species that survived up to the PT mass extinction. There is some research that proposes Yoshi's Trike as being a transition from one species to the next, but it is still early days and I didn't feel confident enough to include it.
@ Which publication is this from? Last I heard, Scannella et al. (2014) referred the Triceratops from the Upper Hell Creek Formation (U3) as T. prorsus: thus the youngest species of the two
@@CAWCarcharo34 You are absolutely right. Looking around, T. prorsus is the younger, but I do not have that in my notes and somehow got it the wrong way round in my head. This is a mistake and I do apologise.
@ We all make mistakes, we’re only human. I should also say your video is absolutely brilliant and I am really looking forward to your next video! Keep it up!!!
Given it's poor senses I'd say that a triceratops has one real option when it discovers a predator. And that involves attacking before it losses track of the damn thing!
My point is that given its poor gaze stabilisation, Triceratops had bad coordination and would likely miss with a charge. If a Tyrannosaurus was spotted by a healthy, alerted Triceratops, it would likely retreat. It seems that one didn't.
@@palaeo_channel It would make sense, Hell Creek is a pretty soft environment, there is plenty of cover, and prey, Trex is going to usually have plenty of easier opportunities. I thought there was a paper that discussed how well trike could turn and pivot, and that it was actually pretty agile. So this might put it in good stead if it failed a charge(or lunge I guess, it does not need to do a full on charge) and during the rare occasions where there might be a more prolonged grappel.
I'm a retired evolutionary biologist, and I think this video was absolutely terrific.
Many thanks for your effort; it was well worth it, at least for the rest of us.
I just bought the book about the beautiful 85% complete Triceratops fossil skeleton mounted in Melbourne Museum last week. An easily digestible yet efficiently detailed read for all Triceratops fans and enthusiasts, I highly recommend it.
Sounds really interesting. Can you give me a name and author?
@ Triceratops: A Natural History by Erich Fitzgerald
Triceratops is known for the three horns on its head. The two above the eyes were each about a meter in length, possibly longer thanks to a keratin sheath. It also sported a large frill, likely used as display and defense. Triceratops was a robust dinosaur, at 7-9 m in length and weighing up to 9 t. The skull was among the largest of any land animal, making up nearly a third of its entire length, the largest known measuring 2.5 m in length.
@@unexpecteddinolesson do you want to watch the video, brush up a few of those numbers and add a few extra facts?
I want you to know that I have seen your message and am looking into how we can do this.
I have sent you an email to the address listed on your channel page.
Great to have you back and it's been worth the wait. While I'm sure you've also had real life things going on it's also great to give an iconic Dinosaur the time and love it deserves. Well-structured and great narration, Visuals are so important to my enjoyment of things so your work is much appreciated. Images, active diagrams, videos and footage of contemporary comparisons, it makes your video so rich.
I think I mentioned before and not that I was aiming criticism at the time, I said that as your channel grew your first investment should be in sound quality as your other techniques were already solid. This sound is so much better.
Thanks. I started during Covid recording voiceovers with my laptop mic under a duvet (like radio presenters were told to at the time). Now I have a proper microphone and software that can clean up the sound.
I'm glad you bring up the lack of sexual-dimorphism in Triceratops, because it's not just Trike. Even very well sampled genera like Centrosaurus & Styracosaurus we find no evidence of sexual-dimorphism that can't just be chalked up to ontogeny & or individual variation. This is unique to large Ceratopsids because in large ornithopods (Maiasaura) & Pachycephalosaurs (Stegoceros) they found evidence of more robust morphs with more injury damage. It makes me wonder if Ceratopsids had a colony bird-like breeding system where both sexes were selecting for the ornamentation on the other.
This is just a theory, but it's interesting to ponder.
That is similar to what I argue. The evidence is that Triceratops used its horns for fighting other Triceratops, but both males and females had equally functional horns.
Another great Dinosaur Profile! Been looking forward to this long one!!!
This was probably the most complete video I've ever seen on one species of dinosaur. Fantastic video
it was fabled that he would return, when the world needed him most! (love the long form videos, thanks!)
Thanks a lot for putting all that thorough, meticulous investigation together to make this astounding Triceratops documentation. I'm just riveted.
An hour well spent. 👌
Great job. I always love your material. This one was a re-watch in the making.
I absolutely love Triceratops so thank you for this profile of my favorite dinosaur. Amazing work on this video, your channel as awesome
Your best work so far!
HOLY! Welcome back Andrew, I missed you.
It's weird why Triceratops & its relatives just kinda took over western North America in the Maastrichtian, this is strange because before this Hadrosaurs were the dominate large herbivores in western North America. With Hadrosaurs making up a majority of the large herbivore population, seen in The Dinosaur Park & Oldman Formations. Even in the Asian Xingezhuang Formation that had a similar ecology to Hell's Creek but instead Sinoceratops was present Hadrosaurs still dominated the region.
So there was something unique about the Triceratopsini tribe that made them able to completely dominate the ecology
It is a really complicated question. It may be something to do with the low rate of Triceratops herds in the fossil record.
Small family herds used competition to keep the strongest males and females in a protective group, leaving less fit members to be solitary. This selected them for predator attacks when they were more vulnerable.
This fitness of a protective group, the defensive abilities of Triceratops, and the vulnerability of ornithopods while Tyrannosaurus was dominant may have played a part.
There are also so many factors that we don't think about and are not preserved in the fossil record.
This was a wonderful video! You did an amazing job!
I actually went on a dig in the Lance formation. We found tons of teeth from both Triceratops and Torosaurus.
Your videos are absolutely fantastic! This is EXACTLY the type of content I enjoy. Keep up the good work!
One of the most beautiful and distinctive creatures in the fossil recond. I wouldn't want to meet one on a dark night though!
I just subbed, these videos are great! I've never seen a dinosaur channel that has so much information (plus the narrators on the other channels can be very annoying.) Good work!
This video is incredible. Thank you.
Wonderful, thanks !!
Dakotaraptor is in an unusual spot in more than one way, past fossil discoveries describes Raptors as starting out Large & as time went they tended to smaller sizes, that is until Dakotaraptor which is in reverse of all previous evidence.
It was certainly an outlier. Although not impossible, it was unusual and being a chimera of a raptor and a turtle makes sense to me in that context.
I am very interested in what the raptor bones show. Whether it is a large raptor, or the turtle bones gave it size. We will just have to wait for the private collector, although they won't be thrilled if their Dakotaraptor turns out to be the size of a turkey.
Absolutely Brilliant!
Excellent video.
American Bison can weigh well over a Ton, yet if you've ever seen Happy Bison (they exhibit this characteristic when led into new grazing fields), they can be Very light on their feet and gallop around like Antelope. Being large & heavy doesn't necessarily mean slow & plodding. Nice work on the video.
There's a very big difference between a 1 ton animal and a 7 tons animal ^^
When you grow in size, your weight grow by a cube, while your legs can only grow by a square. That means that quickly you're too big for your legs and you can't do what you were doing before.
Like you said, a bison can gallop and frollick. An elephant that weighs 4 to 7 tons cannot.
awesome vid!
Amazing vídeo. Keep it up
Outstanding my friend.
Considering your analysis of SUP 9713, your comparison between standard chasmosaur and centrosaur horn layouts, and reconsideration that SUP's "large nasal horn" would have helped it survive, I have to say, the "three big horn" condition (or the "Agathaumas" condition, if you will) for certopsids kind of confuses me. How much would the horns get in the way of each other in terms of simply using them? Would power be dispersed like it would if you knocked multiple arrows? How long can the brow horns be until they start getting in the way of a long nasal horn's function, and vice versa (of course, assuming that they all point in vaguely the same direction, and the brow horns don't just try to do a funky Nasuceratops thing, or something even weirder)? Why is it that centrosaurs, with headgear more fit to lay on offense against tyrannosaurs, died out, while chasmosaurs survived, unless the defensive utility of their horns outweigh having to commit to offense? Are there an papers discussing these sorts of things?
I do not know of any papers expressly discussing this, but Andrew Farke's work seems to propose that the 'Agathaumas condition', as you put it, was better for fighting other Triceratops rather than fighting off predators. It seems that Triceratops reduced its predator offensive ability to greatly reduce its likelihood of killing other Triceratops in combat. This is also why the frill is solid (unusual for ceratopsians). It was a shield for the neck against horn stabs.
It is better for a species if a boisterous young Triceratops gets taught a lesson and learns from it, than being killed from their first mistake.
I read a paper online a few months ago I caught in passing and didn't copy it's location or authors, but apparently it was placed in a bonafied research site (Nature, American Scientific, etc.?), that talked about the amount of what is known as JUNK DNA in a particular species and how long that species has been in existence gathering more Junk DNA along the Years. If there should be a sudden population decrease, even if it was just normal cycling, recessive Genes would start being seen in more & more, till the junk DNA just overwhelms the species & start succumbing to various genetic anomalies. It's believed the Mammoths of Wrangle Island Lost their sense of smell, which for them was OK, that is until it wasn't
While this is not my area of expertise, the so-called 'junk DNA' just sits around and is not evident in most members of a population, and can create innovative features when mutated or turned on. There was an example with a dolphin having pelvic fins due to 'junk DNA' from its ancestors being turned on.
Any inherited trait can become dangerous if there is low genetic diversity to overcome the genetic issues. As far as my understanding is this is what happened to the Wrangle Island Mammoths, and it risks happening to cheetahs today.
Okay I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here regarding “the dinosaur decline “ hypothesis because 1) it assumes that the population trends seen in North America are representative of dinosaur diversity as a whole and kinda ignores the rest of world, what about the last 30 million years in Europe, or the last thirty million years in Asia, Africa, South America, we don’t hear about them.
2) whilst the American fossil sites are good they are Massively Biased towards larger animals meaning hadrosaurs, tyrannosaurs, and Ceratopsids are obviously going to get preserved more than other dinosaurs leading to a false perception of the ecosystem we see in terrestrial Lagerstättes in Asia that once you peel away this bias the average dinosaur is usually quite small with the giants being rare, also mind you that in terms of diversity hell creek proportionally has more small species of those ( as in dinosaurs that weigh less than a ton) than almost all other late Cretaceous American formations only beaten by dinosaur parks with at least 15 uncontroversial species and twenty if you add in the undiscribed, and potential species where as most Campanian and early Maastrichtian sites tend to have less than ten species and keep in mind this is like many different families, hardly grounds to lump them in as declining as well.
3) the cooling argument is also extremely questionable as if prince creek or the dozens of other fossil sites preserving both dinosaurs and cool environments don’t exist some of them being very close relatives to the animals in hell creek and and in the case of edmontosaurus the same exact genus, without issue, and if they’re sex was based of temperature the prince creek animals would have never existed there in the first place yet they did.
For most of your points: Exactly! Welcome to palaeontology.
The Western North American environment is used because it has such a continuous record, not as apparent in Europe, Asia, etc. It is biased and we have to accept that working with what we have. It is difficult to correct bias when we do not know how much we are off by. We do our best with the data we have, and I hope I show that. All of the conclusions are open to critique.
The cooling point is questionable, as it is a hypothesis (I hope I made that clear). The cooling in question was global cooling rather than regional. It would have occurred over millions of years and there were many dinosaurs suited for cooler climates than the western United States at the time. The argument is that the slow cooling wouldn't kill off the dinosaurs in those cold environments but put them under greater pressure. This is what I meant by 'killing them by degrees'.
Thanks for your rant. I do enjoy reading rants about dinosaurs.
nice
Nice!!!
I always just kind of assumed that the frill was there to protect the ceratopsians neck. If its main predator was a t-rex, it just seems reasonable to me that it would evolve to protect itself from bites to the neck from above. All predators are gape limited, so if you have a structure that is larger than your predators bite and it's flat so the predator can't get purchase on it, you have yourself a pretty sold defensive structure, especially when you add some big pointy horns onto it.
Most ceratopsians had huge holes in their frills, making them into more display structures. Also Tyrannosaurus attack survivors generally had wounds to the back and hips. Its bite was so devastating it did not need to target vulnerable points like the neck. Triceratops’ frill seems to me be a defence from other Triceratops horns.
@ so I’m not arguing. It’s likely that I just am missing something, but if most survivors of t-Rex attacks weren’t to the neck, why isn’t that just evidence that the frill worked as a defense against attacks to the neck? (Google survivorship bias in ww2 planes to see what I mean) I don’t see your point there. Also, if the frill had holes in it, wouldn’t that be more likely to allow a long pointy object (such as another ceratopsians horn) to get through than a bite from a t-Rex? Again, I’m sure I’m just missing something here, but both your points seem more likely evidence for my point than yours.
First, I want to commend you for the WW2 airplane example. I was just thinking the same thing around the time I pressed send. The problem is that we have no other signs of bites that are definitely not feeding (apart from the Triceratops with the broken horn).
Triceratops was specialised at fighting members of its own species, and so developed this additional defence for that. This was not the case for other ceratopsians, which would fight, but only if showing off their frill did not work.
I said that Tyrannosaurus did not need to go for the neck because its bite was so strong. Dr David Hone has said that Triceratops’ frill is thinner than bone bitten through by Tyrannosaurus teeth. I mention in my Ankylosaurus video the lengths they went to develop Tyrannosaurus-proof armour.
I understand that you are not arguing and I apologise if it came off that way. We can disagree as we are talking about the adaptations of extinct creatures. If there is anything more that I haven’t made clear, let me know.
@@palaeo_channel thanks for getting back to me! That makes a lot of sense.
And no, you didn’t come off argumentative. I just always hedge my comments like that so that people know my questions are in good faith.
I like your comparison of rich people keeping dinosaur bones is like owning a ancient book you can’t read. Well I have a simple answer: books are cool and so are dinosaurs. It’s also a flex on poor people who can’t afford to buy dinosaurs.
Poor torosaurus, always living (in our minds) under the prehistoric shadow of Big Trike
Given Triceratops poor senses, but big fighting capacity, they were probably cooperating with other species for protection, no? Like a weak dinosaur but with keen eyesight and hearing that would alert them if there's a predator.
While a nice idea and theorised for some dinosaurs (thyreophorans and ornithopods) there is no evidence for it in Triceratops' case.
Triceratops is often found being solitary rather than alongside other dinosaurs. Ornithopod increase had a negative impact on them due to the availability of food.
Ankylosaur increase helped all herbivores by offering a predator deterrent (the true fighters), but their senses were poor too. It seems that ornithopods had the early warning systems, while ceratopsians and ankylosaurs did not, and they were not working together to solve that.
Yes!!!!!
My man! Can't wait to get stuck into the weeds with this one!
I cannot think of any animal that uses a gallop or sprint as their usual form of movement. I do personally not think you needed to clarify that trikes were not constantly sprinting around the place like 5yr olds that have gotten into the red cordial.
I just try to be clear when I can.
@@palaeo_channel Better to be on the safe side I guess.
Wasn't there another study that presented Triceratops as having great hearing?
I did not come across that. Do you know the methodology or the study itself?
@palaeo_channel I checked and, humorously, it was the exact study that determined Triceratops to have a not so acute sense of smell lol.
I should've clarified the results, as I remembered, found Triceratops to have great sensitivity to low frequency sounds
@palaeo_channel as for that, sorry I'm not that avid of an enthusiast to get down to the grit detail
I thought T. prorsus was the younger species?
T. horridus was the younger species that survived up to the PT mass extinction. There is some research that proposes Yoshi's Trike as being a transition from one species to the next, but it is still early days and I didn't feel confident enough to include it.
@ Which publication is this from?
Last I heard, Scannella et al. (2014) referred the Triceratops from the Upper Hell Creek Formation (U3) as T. prorsus: thus the youngest species of the two
@@CAWCarcharo34 You are absolutely right. Looking around, T. prorsus is the younger, but I do not have that in my notes and somehow got it the wrong way round in my head.
This is a mistake and I do apologise.
@ We all make mistakes, we’re only human. I should also say your video is absolutely brilliant and I am really looking forward to your next video! Keep it up!!!
Really like the channel
.all the research and hard work u put in really shows ..keep it up
Given it's poor senses I'd say that a triceratops has one real option when it discovers a predator.
And that involves attacking before it losses track of the damn thing!
My point is that given its poor gaze stabilisation, Triceratops had bad coordination and would likely miss with a charge. If a Tyrannosaurus was spotted by a healthy, alerted Triceratops, it would likely retreat. It seems that one didn't.
@@palaeo_channel It would make sense, Hell Creek is a pretty soft environment, there is plenty of cover, and prey, Trex is going to usually have plenty of easier opportunities.
I thought there was a paper that discussed how well trike could turn and pivot, and that it was actually pretty agile. So this might put it in good stead if it failed a charge(or lunge I guess, it does not need to do a full on charge) and during the rare occasions where there might be a more prolonged grappel.
Cenozoic Profile: Basilosaurus.
Edward Drinker Cope and Seethe.
Lmao lol true
Lassoing a fossil out of a ravine?
What type of cowboy operation was he running?
ha ha ha...