A crown of spikes
Four to six long spikes stuck out from the edge of its frill.
Feathered and unusual · Horned and dome-headed dinosaurs
Styracosaurus
Spiked lizard · sty-RAK-oh-SORE-us
A horned dinosaur with one long horn on its nose and a crown of long spikes around its frill.
- Size
- About 5.5m long; 2.7 tonnes
- Lived
- About 75 million years ago
- Found in
- Alberta, Canada
Trundles after you, spikes fanned. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the styracosaurus
A horn half a metre long
It had one tall horn on its nose, and only small bumps over its eyes.
For show
The spikes pointed backwards and outwards, so they were probably for display.
It lived in herds
A bone bed in Canada holds the remains of many that died together.
A beak and shears
Like Triceratops, it had a beak at the front and slicing teeth at the back.
Smaller than Triceratops
It was about the size of a large rhinoceros.
The real thing
Photos of the styracosaurus
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Low plants such as ferns, cycads and palms.
How we know
A nearly complete skeleton was found in Alberta in 1915.
Keep going
More from Feathered and unusual
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