Jurassic Park was right: Triceratops was a pack animal

• Lennart Blumhof

  Online editor

Turns out Tyrannosaurus rex had lips. Other fearsome carnivores were covered in feathers. The image of the dinosaur from the film was in regular demand Jurassic Park It must be modified significantly due to new ideas.

But in another famous case Jurassic Park-Dino-Triceratops – It now seems that something is right: in popular books and films, animals with three large horns have been depicted as group animals, and Dutch research now confirms this image.

Paleontologist Jimmy de Rooij will receive his doctorate on Wednesday from Utrecht University for his research on Triceratops. For years, he studied a special discovery made by the Naturalis Museum in 2013 in the countryside of the American state of Wyoming. While the museum's research team was looking for a Tyrannosaurus rex, they found a mass grave containing five Triceratops.

This discovery was immediately big news. Before that, Triceratops were often found alone. “So we always thought they were isolated,” says de Rooij. He concludes in his thesis that the five people who found the mass grave most likely lived and died as a group, and therefore dinosaurs were much more social than thought. This is a new vision of an animal that, along with Tyrannosaurus rex, is one of the most popular and well-known dinosaurs.

In science, little is known about Triceratops, says de Rooij, unlike T. rex, for example. “This is actually the most boring dinosaur to research,” the paleontologist says of the notorious carnivorous contemporary Triceratops. “A lot of them have been found and a lot of scientists are working on them, so in terms of research, tyrannosaurs have actually been a bit exhausted.”

This does not apply to Triceratops. De Rooij: “What's special is that several Triceratops skulls have been found, but the rest of the skeleton is very rare. You just need the rest to do the research. That's why we received sometime during the fieldwork in Wyoming in At that moment it also felt like we were sitting On a gold mine.”

In total, about 1,200 bones and bone fragments were uncovered. The finds (more than 10,000 kilograms of fossils) were then transported to the Netherlands to prepare for exhibitions and for research.

De Rooij, who spoke of “extremely rare materials,” was thrilled by this. “Because it could have ended up in an exhibit, and then you wouldn't touch it anymore. For example, there are three Triceratops that are more complete than our Triceratops, but that's why no research has been done on them at all. We haven't selected them.”

He explains that the samples were skillfully extracted from the fossils. “In the past, you would have to cut an entire bone in half. That could be very damaging. Fortunately, we now have modern methods and techniques to minimize damage to the fossil. In the end, we found a very nice compromise between the research and the group.”

De Rooij explains that for his research, fossils from multiple scientific disciplines – biological and geological – were analyzed. For example, research on the lithosphere shows that dinosaurs sank in calm waters – perhaps in a swamp.

A so-called chemical fingerprint was also done for each Triceratops skeleton and the bone tissue was analysed. This revealed that he was a mixture of teenage and young animals. This reinforces the idea that they lived and died as a group, because there were no obviously weak animals among them.