Three-horned face

 

It was just natural that my second post, right after the one with the mighty T. Rex, would feature Triceratops. Both creatures are bundled together in pop culture as eternal arch-enemies, just like Medusa and Perseus, David and Goliath, Hercules and the Hydra, Spider-man and the Green Goblin, Batman and the Joker, and so many more. The difference being that Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops provide ample evidence of their existence in a past way more remote than the one all the others were supposed to have lived in. Clash of the Titans: The Real Deal.

My first contact with old Three-horned Face happened way back when I was seven, when my teacher borrowed a book from the school library to show us what dinosaurs were and how they looked. That was also the pivotal moment that definitely brought dinosaurs to my attention and started an interest that lasts to this day. I already knew what dinosaurs were, though. I remember repeatedly browsing through (and eventually destroying) and old stickers album about natural history that my mother had kept from her school days, which featured dozens of beautifully painted illustrations of environments, scenes, animals, plants, and all kinds of creatures living and extinct. My memories are blurry, but at least a couple of the dinosaur paintings there might have been “inspired” by Rudolph Zallinger’s work (or maybe they were his and the publishers just licensed them). Such was the level of artistry that went into those humble stickers. And I also remember having already seen the original King Kong at that point, and I couldn’t help but think of gigantic lizards in black and white moving in a strangely jerky way when my teacher uttered the word “dinosaurs” to us (one of my classmates even shouted “that one’s in King Kong!” when we were shown a fierce, green Allosaurus depicted on one of the pages of that magical book). But it wasn’t until that day that something clicked inside my mind and I was hooked forever.

What wonderfully awesome book was that, you may be asking? Was it really that good? Well, it certainly was for me then. And in time, and thanks to the interwebz, I’ve found out that many other people from around the world seem to be pretty fond of it, if anything because of the memories they keep from discovering it as kids. Looking at it today though, it’s… not really great, honestly. In fact it was already terribly outdated by the time I stumbled upon it, and most of the illustrations were grossly inaccurate, even for their time. But boy were they powerful in their quirky way, especially for the impressionable eyes of a child. I’m talking about no other than (the Spanish edition of) The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs, written by Darlene Geis and illustrated by Kenyon Shannon, and first published in 1965. I honestly can’t remember anything about the text save for the names of the creatures, but I do remember many of the illustrations clear as day. They were all, of course, pre-renaissance dinosaurs, which means they were very reptilian, rather bulky, and depicted more like monsters and fantasy creatures than real animals (that might actually be a key reason why so many kids my age and older found it consistently amazing). I remember the pages dedicated to Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, T. rex, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and of course our boy Triceratops. I was familiar with the overall shape of theropods, stegosaurs and sauropods, even pterosaurs, but I don’t think I had ever seen a ceratopsian until that very moment. It was a really majestic creature for sure. Like an overgrown blend of a bull, a rhinoceros and a dragon. It looked menacing and really dangerous. And chubby and absolutely inaccurate as it was, it managed to look real, even in black and white (in fact Shannon’s charcoal drawings were miles better than his full-color pieces). Of course, that particular Triceratops didn’t have cheeks. Instead, it featured a long, reptilian mouth like that of a modern lizard. Which was par for the course at the time. Paleontologists still hadn’t come to the conclusion that some herbivorous dinosaurs developed the ability to actually chew their food. And to be fair, some modern reconstructions still depict it that way today, as the jury isn’t 100% out on this issue. Whatever the case, it was a sight to behold and I think it’s one of the very few illustrations in that book that still looks amazing today.

 

Kenyon Shannon's Triceratops from The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs.

 

As a result of me being struck by dinomania, I started repeatedly asking my dad for a dinosaur book, in the hopes of getting something similar to the Wonder Book, or maybe even the real deal. Instead, he came home with Dinosaurs and How They Lived, written by British author Steve Parker and illustrated by Italian artists Giuliano Fornari and Sergio (yes, he’s known by that mononym for some reason). And even though I wasn’t aware at the time, it was a much better book, more modern and in tune with the ideas of the Dinosaur Renaissance sparked by paleontologists like John Ostrom and Bob Bakker in the 1960s, and as a consequence its text painted an image of dinosaurs as active, probably warm-blooded animals more akin to modern mammals and (especially) birds than to today’s reptiles. Pretty much what one should expect from a book published in 1988. The art inside the book though is a blend of both new and old ideas, all of them depicted with painstaking detail by two incredibly proficient artists, who were obviously not specialized in dinosaurs or paleoart. On the one hand, big theropods and iguanodonts are still depicted as having the old tail-dragging, fully erect posture from the days of old. On the other one, smaller predators like Deinonychus and Struthiomimus already show a more horizontal posture with their tails parallel to the ground, just like they are now known to have been. And what’s more relevant to today’s protagonist, most ornithischians already have cheeks in this book. It was really shocking for me as a kid to see Triceratops sporting that parrot-like beak as a mouth at the end of its snout. Combined with those slit pupils Sergio decided to put on the animal’s eyes, it looked at first like a perversion of the dinosaur I thought I knew. But what was the point of of a 7 year old going through the pages of a dinosaur book if they didn’t learn anything new and shocking?

 

Sergio's "snake eyes" Triceratops from Dinosaurs and How They Lived.

 

Shortly after that, my dad surprised me with another (apparently more technical) book: David Lambert’s A Field Guide to Dinosaurs. And since this new book (actually 5 years older than the other one, but I was unaware of that for a long time) also showed Triceratops with fully fleshed cheeks and that parrot-like beak, I was sold on that image for the creature from then on. And I even inadvertently carried some of the mistakes and outdated ideas from this work to my own book. For instance, I stupidly placed Triceratops in the “short-frilled ceratopsians” (Centrosaurinae) subfamily with Styracosaurus and Centrosaurus instead of the “long-frilled” ones (Chasmosaurinae) with Torosaurus and Chasmosaurus because… well, it obviously had a short frill AND the Field Guide did exactly that. I didn’t even question it. In my defense, back then finding reliable sources and up-to-date information online wasn’t easy, and as I already said all the books available to me were pretty old. I eventually found out I had made a mistake though, and corrected the text, but Triceratops stayed on the “short-frilled” illustration for aesthetic reasons.

Triceratops, as depicted on A Field Guide to Dinosaurs.

One thing I couldn’t have predicted at the time, and therefore was nowhere to be found on my book, was that in 2010 paleontologists Jack Horner and John B. Scannella would question the validity of Torosaurus as a genus, arguing that it could actually represent the true adult form of Triceratops. Through a study of fossil bone histology, Scannella and Horner proposed that sub-adult Triceratops had a shorter, solid frill, whereas fully grown adults grew the longer frills so characteristic of the Chasmosaurinae, and developed frill holes to make them lighter. Although it’s an interesting hypothesis, it’s far from being proven, and there is some evidence that this is actually not the case, like the apparent existence of actual Torosaurus sub-adult specimens markedly different from Triceratops. Also, the lack of actual transitional forms between the two in the fossil record and that idea of “developing” holes on a solid frill are problematic to say the least. The debate remains open, but until more solid evidence is presented both are currently considered valid. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, though. Paleontology is exciting (to some of us at least!).

The Torosaurus piece I made for my book, back in 2007.

 

Another thing I wasn’t aware of until very recently is that, as I said earlier in the post, it hasn’t been conclusively proven that ceratopsians like Triceratops actually had cheeks, and in fact very recently I’ve been seeing drawings, paintings and figures online depicting them with a long, reptilian mouth again, just like Charles R. Knight did back in the day. And they look really cool, I must admit.

Whatever the way it is graphically represented, Triceratops is one majestic creature, beautiful and dangerous at the same time. That’s why it fascinated me early on in my life, and keeps amazing kids today. Like many other prehistoric animals, it looks too weird to be real but also too plausible to be a fantasy creature. And I think children can somehow perceive that instinctively. That’s one of the reasons why they have always been the largest audience for dinosaur-related media and products. Dinosaurs capture our imagination in a way centaurs, griffins and dragons can’t, because, after all, dinosaurs are real. And this would be a great way to end my post on a high note, if I hadn’t realized while writing that there’s a thing out there called Pokémon that isn’t even remotely real and fascinates and hooks kids even more than dinosaurs. So probably I’m overthinking it and it’s only that both dinosaurs and Pokémon are just COOL. It’s a good enough explanation for me.

That’s it for today. Take care and see you all very soon.

My full, unedited Triceratops piece.