http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v732/battle-brak/Dinosaurs/TrikeVer2.jpg

I’ll probably put some form of quills on him down the line, but I wanted to keep speculation to a minimum on this version.

“I can’t begin to tell you how bummed I was that the “wooly tyrannosaur” they mentioned did not exist.”

To be fair, we now know that it did exist in the form of Yutyrannus.

“Predatory behavior in entelodonts, large pig-like artiodactyles, is not well-documented, but implied bone middens of some taxa are, bones covered as they are in tooth marks that can be interpreted beyond merely scavenging. So, it’s not implausible, but the dental morphology itself isn’t extremely useful to describe these things.”

Entelodonts have really weird skulls compared to pigs/peccaries. The premolars are triangular and almost reminiscent of early whale teeth, and are often worn solely at their tips. Supposedly there is also a trackway documenting what may be an entelodont/early rhino chase, but I am unaware if this has ever been published. There’s actually a lot of information on entelodont predatory behaviors out there, from the trackways to the bone middens you mentioned and more.

Anyway, one of the “added details” they presented in the book was that the quills of Psittacosaurus were venomous, and so someone could have extrapolated this “phylogenetic information” to Triceratops based on the possible presence of quills.

Incidentally, the idea that Triceratops had crocodilian-like belly scales is also based on rumors of the well-preserved Triceratops skin at the HMNS.

I am the one who wrote that list under the name of TyB (that was some time ago, tho!). I apologize for any confusion that my list may have caused.

The info on Triceratops was given to me by a member of the Dinosaur Mail Listing whose name, I believe, was Mike, but I can´t remember his last name. We kept correspondence for a while, and he mentioned that skin impressions of Triceratops had been found and that they showed this series of strange nipple-shaped bumps of which no one knew the function. The poison-gland thing was just one of many possibilities he mentioned, each one as unlikely as the other; I apologize if the list made it sound as if it was proven fact or as if the poison idea was more likely than the others. He too was the one who mentioned the gator-like scales on the belly of which I haven´t heard anything ever since.

There were other things he told me about Triceratops but some of them seem to have been incorrect, so it may be that the other info he gave me wasn´t right either. Problem with the internet is that anyone can pose as an expert. All I tried to do with the list was to share new discoveries that excited me- and what I wrote was what I believed to be true at the time.

Best regards!

and one of the comments at:

http://blog.hmns.org/2012/05/introducing-lane-a-mummified-triceratops-with-a-new-address-at-5555-hermann-park-dr/

Pics at: http://www.childrensmuseum.org/blog/family-programs/day-5-digging-the-black-hills-institute

The blogger sounds like s/he grossly over-interpreted what little had already been written…which is, of course, how lots of dinosaur misinformation get started!

This is all second-hand information, of course, but I have no reason to doubt said friend. I don’t think anything about the skin impressions has been published so far.