One of the biggest heads
Its skull could be 2.5 metres long: among the largest of any land animal.
The plant-eaters · Horned and dome-headed dinosaurs
Triceratops
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.
- Size
- About 9m long; 6 to 10 tonnes
- Lived
- About 68 to 66 million years ago
- Found in
- Western North America
Trundles after you, horns first. 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 triceratops
Horns a metre long
The brow horns grew to about a metre, and changed shape as the animal grew up.
It fought T. rex, and each other
Some frills have healed Tyrannosaurus bites. Other wounds match the horns of another Triceratops.
Eight hundred teeth
Its jaws held stacks of teeth that sliced like shears, with new ones always growing in.
One of the last
It was among the very last dinosaurs alive before the asteroid.
Very common
In the rocks of Montana it is the dinosaur found most often.
The real thing
Photos of the triceratops
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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
Tough, low plants such as palms, cycads and ferns, sheared off with its beak.
How we know
Hundreds of skulls are known. Complete skeletons are much rarer.