Dinosaur fossils & 3D skeletons › Triceratops
Triceratops Fossil & 3D Skeleton
Triceratops horridus
- Age
- Cretaceous, about 69.1 million years ago
- Found in
- United States
- Length
- 8.5 m
- Height
- 3.2 m
- Group
- Ceratopsians (such as Triceratops)
How this 3D skeleton was made
All 232 bone shapes were built from figures of this species' own fossils or from published 3D data made from its specimens.
From this species 232Borrowed from relatives 0Estimated 0
Bones known from fossils
192 of 232 bones are known from fossils. 40 are missing and filled in.
Known 192Filled in 40No record 0
Tap a bone on the 3D page to see where each bone shape came from.
Sources
- 【Scaled to widely cited body length】 This skeletal model has a total length of 6.48 m. Because this differs greatly from the commonly cited body length (8–9 m; no source stated in the article (widely cited size); from the English Wikipedia "Triceratops" article), the entire skeleton was scaled by 1.31× to 8.5 m for display (because the reference specimen and diagram represented a smaller individual). 3D Skeleton: Sellers & Pond (2015) figshare doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.2008977 (CC BY 4.0). The original specimen and scale are not stated in the source (the model's length of 6.15 m is smaller than the measured 7.6 m of USNM 4842 in Dempsey et al. 2025). Pose (2026-09-30): Referencing the foot placement in Evans and Ryan 2015 PLOS ONE Fig. 3 (Wendiceratops), we estimated a wide-striding gait swinging the forelimb forward with horns pointing ahead. Stride length, joint angles, neck and head orientation, and lateral tail swing are estimates tailored to this model for display, not a reconstruction of measured locomotion or speed for this species. Fine joint angle adjustments to maintain ground contact and skeletal articulation are also estimated. The repositioning of the skull and lower jaw together to match the neck-to-skull articulation is also an estimate on the model. Rather than a walking diagram of this exact species, the bone orientations were adapted from a diagram of a relative sharing the same gait.
- Bones found: Not yet collected (there is no species-level bone inventory for ornithischians). Gray = uninvestigated
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