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50 free Triceratops trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Triceratops is the archetypal horned dinosaur, and this quiz goes well beyond 'three horns and a frill'. It covers what the name means, how big the animal and its enormous skull were, how many teeth were stacked in its dental battery, what the frill was probably for, why palaeontologists argue about whether Torosaurus is just an old Triceratops, and how a fossil discovered by a cowboy's lasso ended up named as a bison. It also digs into the fights and the finds: the T. rex tooth marks that healed on a Triceratops horn, Big John's frill wound from another Triceratops and his 6.6 million euro sale, Lane's fossil skin from Wyoming, the 1900 Paris Exposition mount, Charles Knight's mural that made T. rex and Triceratops enemies forever, and its status as Wyoming's state dinosaur. Easy questions ask which continent and how many horns; hard ones want vertebra counts, holotype numbers and species names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Triceratops and Big John, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Dinosaurs and Tyrannosaurus Rex quizzes go further.
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Q 01What does the name Triceratops mean?
Three-horned face
From the Greek tri, keras and ops; the 'ops' ending is 'face', not 'lizard'.
Q 02Triceratops lived roughly how many million years ago?
69 to 66
That makes it one of the very last non-avian dinosaurs, alive right up to the extinction event.
Q 03Which large predator shared the landscape with Triceratops and most likely preyed on it?
T. rex
Charles Knight's 1928 mural at the Field Museum fixed the pair as enemies in the popular imagination.
Q 04Triceratops measured about how long?
8 to 9 m
And weighed 6 to 10 tonnes, with a rhino-like body plan.
Q 05Modern interpretations suggest Triceratops's horns and frill were primarily used for what?
Species recognition, courtship and display
The traditional view was pure defence; today most researchers see them mainly as signals, though combat scars show they were used too.
Q 06Triceratops belongs to which ceratopsid subfamily, despite its short frill?
Chasmosaurinae
Its short solid frill long fooled researchers into grouping it with the centrosaurines; the long brow horns gave the game away.
Q 07How many species of Triceratops were considered valid as of 2025?
Two
T. horridus and T. prorsus, out of seventeen named over the years; the two are separated by rock layer, so they never met.
Q 08Which contemporary ceratopsid did a 2010 paper argue was simply a fully mature Triceratops?
Torosaurus
Scannella and Horner's idea is still disputed; critics point to Torosaurus subadults and Triceratops individuals too old to be immature.
Q 09Who first described Triceratops, in 1889?
Othniel Charles Marsh
He had already named the first specimen as a species of giant Pliocene bison two years earlier.
Q 10Marsh initially named a pair of Triceratops brow horns found near Denver in 1887 as what?
Bison alticornis
He thought the rock was Pliocene and the bones belonged to an unusually large bison; a third, better skull changed his mind.
Q 11A cowboy first tried to recover the Triceratops holotype skull how?
By lassoing one of its horns
The horn snapped off, the skull tumbled to the bottom of the cleft, and the horn ended up with fossil hunter John Bell Hatcher.
Q 12The Triceratops holotype was collected in 1888 from which formation?
Lance
Marsh first called it Ceratops horridus and only coined Triceratops when preparation revealed the third, nasal horn.
Q 13The species name horridus is Latin for what?
Rough or rugose
It probably refers to the rough texture of the type specimen, later recognised as an elderly individual.
Q 21The Triceratops nicknamed 'Lane', displayed in Houston, is famous for preserving what?
Large areas of skin
The skin survives as clay templating from a bacterial mat, with basement scales up to 90 mm across, the biggest of any ceratopsian.
Q 22Dinosauria is defined as all descendants of the last common ancestor of Triceratops and what?
Modern birds
Ornithischia, likewise, is everything closer to Triceratops than to birds.
Q 23Which early ceratopsian, described in the late 1990s, is the earliest known with brow horns?
Zuniceratops
Yinlong, described in 2006, is the first Jurassic ceratopsian; the group seems to have begun in Asia.
Q 14Between 1889 and 1891, John Bell Hatcher collected how many more Triceratops skulls?
Thirty-one
The variety among them spawned a flurry of species names that later researchers boiled down to two.
Q 15The largest known Triceratops skull is estimated at what length?
2.5 m
That is nearly a third of the whole animal, among the largest heads of any land animal ever.
Q 16How long were Triceratops's brow horns?
About 1 metre
One sat above each eye; the nose horn was shorter and sometimes a separate bone called the epinasal.
Q 17Triceratops's upper jaw held 36 to 40 tooth positions, each with how many teeth stacked vertically?
Three to five
The stacked columns formed a 'dental battery' for shearing tough plants; the front of the mouth was a toothless beak.
Q 18Unlike most other ceratopsids, the frill of Triceratops was what?
Solid, without large openings
Most relatives had big parietal fenestrae; the debate about its cousin hinges partly on whether holes opened up with age.
Q 19How many hooves did Triceratops have on its forelimbs and hindlimbs?
Three in front, four behind
Only the first three fingers bore weight; digits four and five were vestigial stubs without claws.
Q 20Trackways suggest Triceratops's front-leg posture was most comparable to which modern animal?
Rhinoceros
Older paintings gave it sprawling forelegs like a lizard.
Q 24Is there good evidence that Triceratops lived in herds?
No, only one small bonebed of three juveniles
Other ceratopsians are known from vast bonebeds; Triceratops is nearly always found alone, though a family group of three turned up near Newcastle in 2012.
Q 25Which specimen shows a partly healed hole in its frill apparently made by another Triceratops's horn?
Big John
The healing bone supports the idea that Triceratops used its horns in fights with its own kind, not just against predators.
Q 26Big John, the largest known Triceratops skeleton, sold at auction in 2021 for how much?
€6,600,000
About $7.7 million, a record for a Triceratops that stoked worries about private fossil ownership.
Q 27Big John was discovered in 2014 in which US state?
South Dakota
Fossil hunter Walter Stein spotted a debris field on a ranch at Mud Butte within 10 to 15 minutes of searching.
Q 28Big John is estimated to have lived to about what age?
60
That is roughly double the longest life estimated for any T. rex.
Q 29Partially healed tyrannosaur tooth marks on a Triceratops brow horn and frill are evidence of what?
A head-on fight the horned dinosaur survived
Peter Dodson reckoned a bull Triceratops would usually win such a fight, inflicting fatal wounds with its horns.
Q 30A heavily tooth-scored Triceratops ilium and sacrum show that Tyrannosaurus did what?
Fed on the horned dinosaur
Whether it killed the animal or scavenged it, the pelvis was clearly on the menu.