Ceratopsia

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Ceratopsia

[‚ser·ə′täp·sē·ə]
(paleontology)
The horned dinosaurs, a suborder of Upper Cretaceous reptiles in the order Ornithischia.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Ceratopsia

 

(horned dinosaurs), a suborder of reptiles of the order Ornithischia. Horned dinosaurs lived during the Late Cretaceous in Central Asia (the most ancient representatives) and in South and North America. They resembled rhinoceroses and had a body length to 6 m. The neck was encircled by a “frill” of proliferated skull bones. The frill served as protection against predators. The majority of ceratopsians had between one and five horns on the head and, sometimes, accessory bony spines along the edges of the frill. The anterior portion of the jaws formed the “bill.” The teeth were arranged in several rows and served for grinding plant substances. The anterior cervical vertebrae, which supported the heavy skull, were usually concresced. The feet were hoofed. Horned dinosaurs lived in the forest steppe and in meadows near water. They were among the last dinosaurs, becoming extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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"Before this study," says Morschhauser, "we had to rely on Psittacosaurus, a more distantly related and unusual ceratopsian, for our picture of what the last bipedal ceratopsian looked like."
Horned Dinosaur from China Walked On Two Feet
Reconstruction of this external force environment and consequent determination of whether or not ceratopsians galloped requires more sophisticated comparative methods or paleobiomechanics or both (Adams, 1991c).
The evidence provided by the scaling equation for humeral diameter indicates that ceratopsians were complex organisms with a number of powerfully adaptive structures that reduced bending stresses in their limbs, in ways other than a simple increase of the surface area through which stress operated.
The behavioral significance of frill and horn morphology in ceratopsians. Evolution, 29:353-361.
-- It has been argued that ceratopsian humeri have massive shafts that are prima facie evidence of galloping.
A scaling equation for humeral diameter in ceratopsian dinosaurs
They've found more than 300 dinosaurs from 35 species, duck-billed hadrosaurs to horned ceratopsians.
Dinosaur country
With the advent of new discoveries of ceratopsians, multiple biogeographic models now exist to explain the global distribution of their skeletal remains (Chinnery et al., 1998; Chinnery-Allgeier and Kirkland, 2010).
(2000): The fossil record, systematics and evolution of pachycephalosaurs and ceratopsians from Asia.
These are all key features in the identification of ceratopsian tracks (sensu McCrea et al., 2001).
The length of the chord of the arc of the track is approximately 25 cm, which is approximately half the size of purported ceratopsian manus tracks found west of Denver, Colorado, USA attributed to the 10 m long Maastrichtian Triceratops (Lockley and Hunt, 1995).
A probable neoceratopsian manus track from the Nanushuk Formation (Albian, Northern Alaska)/Probable pisada de neoceratopsia en la Formacion Nanushuk (Albiense, Norte de Alaska)
Johnson says that Torosaurs, Triceratops and probably all ceratopsian dinosaurs had sprawling lizard-like forelimbs after all, and therefore could not gallop.
Reining in a galloping Triceratops

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