With their huge horns and their spike-spotted frills, triceratops weren’t the world’s friendliest-looking dinosaurs. But over a decade of digging at a fossil-laden bonebed in Wyoming has found a troop of five fossilized triceratops that lived and died together, supporting the long-standing suspicion that these dinosaurs were friendlier than they looked.
The find serves as some of the strongest fossil evidence that these horned dinosaurs traveled in herds — a survival strategy potentially as potent as their horns and their frills. Announced this spring in a shared statement from the Netherlands’ Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Utrecht University, the discovery adds depth to our understanding of the lives and deaths of these ferocious herbivores.
