Horn damage hints at Triceratops battles
Jeff Hecht
19:00 23 June 04

The three-horned dinosaur Triceratops could apparently wrestle head-to-head
with members of its own species.

Palaeontologists have long wondered how the plant-eating beast used its
formidable horns. Initial suggestions that they were used to fend off
predators have given way to the notion that males locked horns in combat, as
African antelope and bison do.

But no one had shown how it could actually work, so Andy Farke, a graduate
student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook took a pair of
25-centimetre plastic models of actual Triceratops skulls and tested how
they fitted together.

He found three distinct ways the animals could lock horns. That alone did
not prove the animals locked horns in life, so Farke checked actual skulls
for evidence of damage by horns.

Several fossils showed damage consistent with his theory of horned combat.
The number of observations is too small to prove his case, but Farke plans
to survey more skulls to see if the pattern is consistent, and to check
other horned dinosaurs

>From NewScientist
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996059

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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