Dino card No. 1747 of 2,015

Tatankaceratops

Say it: tah-TAN-kah-SER-ah-tops

Name means: “bison horned face”1

Ate: PlantsHorned dinosLate Cretaceous

Tatankaceratops was a small, horned dinosaur that lived about 66 million years ago. It had a short, slender brow horn and a long nose horn, like a tiny Triceratops. Scientists are not sure if it was a real new kind of dinosaur or just a young Triceratops with a strange growth problem.1

Lived

84 to 66 million years ago2

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

South Dakota, USA, in the Hell Creek Formation1 2

Food

Plants2

Artist's life restoration of Tatankaceratops — How Tatankaceratops may have looked, by NobuTamura email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com palaeocritti. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Scientists still argue about colours and details.

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Tatankaceratops is known from only one partial skull, which is kept at the Black Hills Institute in South Dakota.1

Its name means 'bison horned face' because its nose horn reminded scientists of a bison's horn.1

The skull of Tatankaceratops has a strange mix of features: some parts look like a young dinosaur, but other parts are fused and worn like an old adult.1

Some scientists think Tatankaceratops might be a dwarf species of Triceratops, or just a Triceratops that had a disorder that stopped it from growing normally.1

Tatankaceratops lived at the very end of the age of dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, in the same time and place as Triceratops.1

Myth buster

Myth: Tatankaceratops is definitely a new, separate dinosaur genus.

Truth: Many scientists now think Tatankaceratops is just a young Triceratops or a Triceratops with a growth disorder, not a valid genus.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Tatankaceratops
Named by: Ott and Larson 20102
Group: Horned dinos
Family / clade: Ceratopsidae2
Classification: Ornithischia > Ceratopsia > Ceratopsidae2
Age of the rocks: 84 to 66 million years (Campanian to Maastrichtian)2
Rock formations: Hell Creek2
Countries: USA2
Fossil records: 166 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Tatankaceratops was named by Christopher J. Ott and Peter L. Larson in 2010, based on a partial skull found in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota.1
Still debated: Scientists still debate whether Tatankaceratops is a valid genus, a dwarf species of Triceratops, or just a Triceratops with a developmental disorder.1

Where the facts come from

Tatankaceratops (en.wikipedia.org)
Tatankaceratops in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@dinowiki.app and we will fix it.