July 20, 2006 — The partial skull and frill of a baby triceratops have emerged from the Montana Badlands, only the sixth discovery of its kind and one that promises to reveal clues about the dino's poorly understood life history.
A team under the direction of Jack Horner, a Discovery Channel-funded paleontologist, made the discovery last week as part of a 10-year dig in the Hell Creek formation of eastern Montana.
In an exclusive onsite interview with Discovery News, Horner said this discovery was more exciting than finding a Tyrannosaurus rex — an experience he has had about a dozen times.
Triceratops is the most common dinosaur found in the Hell Creek formation, a prehistoric riverbed spanning parts of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
Hell Creek has offered up more dinosaurs than any other place in the world, thanks to its exposed sediments from the Cretaceous era, the heyday of the dinosaurs.
"This one is a precious size; its orbital horns are about three inches long. That makes the summer in itself, absolutely," Horner said.
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"These things are quite rare," agreed Peter Makovicky, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
"Adult triceratops skulls are quite abundant, but the little ones don't preserve as well because they fall apart easily. So it's one of those dinosaurs where we know a lot about the adult but very little about the young, and about the life history."
The first young triceratops skull was excavated from Hell Creek in 1997. The researchers won't know just how young this one is until the fossil is separated from the rock.
Horner said younger fossils can answer many questions about the growth and development of triceratops. The baby skull, for example, shows how the direction of the orbital horns above the creature's eyes change as a triceratops develops.
Montana State University graduate student Sonya Scarff noticed part of the orbital horn sticking out of the rock while prospecting for fossils.
"I didn't really know what to expect," Scarff said, "I found a lot of places that just have surface bone, so I kind of just assumed, what you see is what you get. But we started digging, and found a lot more, and that's pretty cool."
Horner, who is chief curator of the Museum of the Rockies, says this baby skull will be a perfect compliment to the other four young skulls at the museum. He is so excited, in fact, that he is making the six-hour journey back to Bozeman, Mont. to personally deliver the skull to the museum.
Scarff said the four-member dig team would dedicate extra energy and time to this site, dubbed "Afternoon Delight" because of the significance of the finding.
The discovery is "very important," said Makovicky, of Chicago's Field Museum. By studying both adult and juvenile fossils, "we can start gleaning unknown information about these animals’ life histories and population trends," he said.
They will keep digging until they no longer find triceratops bone in the rock; only then will Horner be satisfied.
The dinosaur fossils found in Hell Creek are also known as the "last dinosaurs" because they are approximately 65 million years old, on the brink of extinction.
This is the seventh year of Horner's decade-long Hell Creek project.
Horner said his goal was to collect as much material as possible about dinosaurs in this era, then get a better understanding of how dinosaurs lived.
