3-horned dinosaurs lived in the herd

So far, triceratops have been given unusual animals among their cousins ​​ceratopids. While many ceratopids - a group of herbivorous dinosaurs living at the end of the white chalk - were found in herds, all three horned dinosaur fossils (a total of 50 fossils) were found alone.

However, a group of three young dinosaurs discovered in the barren lands of the North Central United States showed that the 3-horned dinosaurs are not only living creatures, but also the characteristic of gathering in special flocks of juvenile dinosaurs.

Stephen Brusatte, a member of the American Museum of Natural History and a doctoral student at Columbia University, said: 'This finding is interesting. It reveals some things about this dinosaur's life. What we found is that the trend of many dinosaurs is that the juveniles live and move together in groups'.

In 2005, Brusatte and colleagues discovered and excavated a site where several juvenile horned dinosaurs were buried in a 66-million-year-old rock in Southeastern Montana. Geological evidence shows that at least 3 immature dinosaurs have been buried here at the same time due to a flood, and they are likely to have lived together when disaster struck. This finding shows that juvenile 3-horned dinosaurs live in small groups, a social behavior that has been discovered in many other dinosaurs, such as Psittacosaurus, a relative of the live triceratops. in Asia.

Juvenile horned dinosaurs are being excavated in Montana. (Photo: S. Brusatte)

Joshua Mathews of Burpee Natural History Museum and Northern Illinois University, who led the project, said: 'We don't know why they live in groups or how long they live together. Living as a herd can protect each other, and our prediction is that this is not the behavior that they perform full-time. '

This excavation site was discovered in 2005 by the Burpee Helmuth Redschlag Museum's volunteers. Redschlag is a fan of the television program The Simpson and named this position 'Homer Site'.

Brusatte said: 'It's quite fitting that the big horned 3 dinosaurs are named after Homer Simpson. But more importantly, we were able to discover something completely unexpected, although the number of 3-horned dinosaurs was three times as many as other dinosaurs, and Southeastern Montana was be scoured for fossils searching for hundreds of years'. Excavations at Homer Site are still ongoing, and the Burpee Museum team hopes to find other fossils of the triceratops.

The study was published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology. In addition to Matthews and Brusatte, Scott Williams and Michael Henderson, along with Burpee Natural History Museum and Northern Illinois University, are the authors of the study.