The Dinosaurs of Wyoming - Wyoming State Geological Survey ...

THE THR E-HORNED DINOSAuRS 99
dinosaurs, yield the information that the huge three-horned
dinosaurs, the Ceratopsia, were exclusively plant feedersstood
upon four stumpy legs and had the hugest bony bonnet
of any creatures which ever lived. Dull-witted these hugeheaded
reptiles must have been with a two-pound brain lodged
in a thousand pound head. They didn't need much brain, for
their lives were not complicated. They ate, they slept and
very occasionally they fought-but mostly they slept. Life
was easy in those Wyoming-Mesozoic days; food abundant,
and enemies few. The carnivorous dinosaurs could have fed
full upon the body of a Triceratops, for here was tons and
tons of meat and bone-could they have gotten it.
Triceratops was tolerably well provided for offense and
defense. Its huge horned head, with its extensive bony frill
would ward off most attacks, without damage to itself, provided
the enemy could be met head first. Attacks on the
flanks, however, by hungry carnivorous dinosaurs could not·
so easily be repelled. Turning to meet such an attack must
have been somewhat time-consuming. Injuries on head and
body show that. such attacks were made, but we cannot tell
how many such attempts were successful; and then it may be
that the gigantic flesh-eaters were carrion feeders. A herd of
the Tyrant-K;ng dinosaurs could have caused wide-spread
desolation among the animal life of the Upper Cretaceousbut
perhaps they were more sluggish than we anticipate. A
small brain in a fifty-foot animal does not suggest much activity-and
perhaps one full gorge of meat would last the King
dinosaur a week or two.
Cope's collection of fragmentary dinosaurian material made
in 1875 and 1876, now in the American Museum of Natural
History, formed the starting point in our knowledge of the
great three-horned dinosaur group, although Cope did not
recognize the existence of the sub-order-Ceratopsia. This
was done by Marsh on more complete material secured by
Hatcher. Leidy had much earlier described some dinosaur
teeth collected in this area by the geologist Hayden in 1855.
In the autumn of 1888 J. B. Hatcher found a pair of very
large horn cores thirty-five miles from Lusk, Wyoming, looking
so like the horn cores of bison, that Marsh described a new
species of bison based on dinosaur horn cores; but at that time
no one had dreamed about the existence of the Ceratopsia, as
the group of three-horned dinosaurs are called. Early the
next spring, 1889, the discovery of the horn cores led Hatcher
to the discovery of the great dinosaur-bearing locality in Niobrara
County, Wyoming, the collections from which enabled
Marsh to define the three-horned dinosaur group, and here