Torosaurus by Moondawg

Torosaurus (meaning "perforated lizard") was a ceratopsid dinosaur genus. It had one of the largest skulls of any land animal known, reaching 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) in length.

Torosaurus belonged to the subfamily known as Chasmosaurinae, within the family Ceratopsidae, within the Ceratopsia (which name is Ancient Greek for "horned face"), a group of herbivorous dinosaurs with parrot-like beaks which thrived in North America and Asia during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. Recent studies indicate that Torosaurus is most closely related to Triceratops.[3] Jack Horner has suggested in public lectures that Torosaurus may in fact represent the adult version of one sex of Triceratops, pointing out that there are no juvenile specimens of Torosaurus and that approximately 50% of all subadult Triceratops skulls have two thin areas in the frill that correspond with the placement of "holes" in Torosaurus skulls. The theory is that all Tricertops had solid frills up to adulthood, but on reaching sexual maturity, one sex or the other would have developed longer frills as a form of display. To counterbalance the extra weight of the elongated frill, holes would have necessarily developed in the bone. While this theory does explain the absence of any Torosaurus specimens younger than adults and also explains the even split between uniformly thick frills and frills with thin patches in subadult Triceratops specimens, the theory is not widely accepted in the scientific community and has apparently not been put forward by Dr. Horner outside of informal lectures.

Inspired by the Zoo Tek Brains Trust