Triceratops Brow Horn

The herbivorous Triceratops ("three-horned face") is undoubtedly one of the world's best-known and most popular dinosaurs, due to its distinctive bony frill, keratinous beak, and of course, its three-horned skull. Fearsome in appearance, their horns were long considered to serve a primarily defensive function, though recent studies suggest that the horns were also used in dominance displays and courtship rituals.

Triceratops are often depicted engaging in epic battles with Tyrannosaurus rex, and researchers have proposed that indentations found in some T. rex fossils were caused by Triceratops horns. Given that both dinosaurs lived in what is now Western North America approximately 67 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period, this is no idle speculation. However, one fact of which we can be reasonably certain is that Triceratops was one of the last dinosaurs alive before the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In 2011, researchers discovered a triceratops horn much like this one just 5 inches below the extinction boundary, providing strong evidence that at least some Triceratops were living at the time of the Chicxulub asteroid strike in the Yucatán 66 million years ago, the most likely cause of the Cretaceous extinction event and the demise of the dinosaurs.