This page has six of the great plant-eaters of the Cretaceous, each with its own answer to the problem of being hunted. Move your pointer and one will follow you. Choose a different one at the bottom, and tap the notes to open them.
Its skull could be 2.5 metres long: among the largest of any land animal.
The brow horns grew to about a metre, and changed shape as the animal grew up.
Some frills have healed Tyrannosaurus bites. Other wounds match the horns of another Triceratops.
Its jaws held stacks of teeth that sliced like shears, with new ones always growing in.
It was among the very last dinosaurs alive before the asteroid.
In the rocks of Montana it is the dinosaur found most often.
Meet them all
Three-horned face · try-SERRA-tops
A massive plant-eater with a huge head, two long horns over its eyes, a shorter one on its nose and a solid bony frill.
Fused lizard · an-KIE-loh-SORE-us
A wide, low dinosaur armoured with bony plates from head to tail, with a heavy club on the end of its tail.
Near crested lizard · PA-ra-saw-ROL-off-us
A duck-billed dinosaur with a long, hollow, curved crest sweeping back from its head.
Iguana tooth · ig-WAH-no-don
A large plant-eater with a horse-like head, a toothless beak and a sharp spike on each thumb.
Thick-headed lizard · PAK-ee-SEF-ah-lo-SORE-us
A two-legged plant-eater with a domed skull ringed by bony knobs and short spikes.
Argentine lizard · AR-jen-TEEN-oh-SORE-us
A colossal long-neck: one of the largest animals ever to walk on land.
Good to know
The Cretaceous is the last and longest period of the age of dinosaurs.
Flowering plants appeared and spread, along with bees and butterflies.
Sea levels were very high. Shallow seas covered much of Europe and split North America in two.
Creta is Latin for chalk. The white cliffs of Dover formed on a Cretaceous sea floor.
There were more kinds of dinosaur in the Cretaceous than at any other time.
An asteroid about ten kilometres wide struck what is now Mexico, 66 million years ago.
The Cretaceous: 2 more places
Real fossils, skeletons and museum models of the animals on this page. Tap one to see it bigger.
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons and are used under free licences. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews. Open a photo to see who took it.
Most dinosaurs ate plants. Horns, armour, size, speed and living in a crowd were all ways of not being eaten in turn.
Back to the topAnimals from other periods live on their own pages: choose another.