Protoceratops

winAll right, let's start off with, uh, my good friend K Raptor, who's 13 from St. Johns, Florida.

"I'd like to know who would win, Minmi or Protoceratops." What a, what a neat fight.

Minmi, of course, is just the cutest.

[laughs] Well, both of these are really good dinosaurs.

Minmi is the little armored dinosaur from Australia, and Protoceratops is the small, uh, cousin of Triceratops and all ceratopsians.

This is an interesting one because Minmi has body armor, and little Protoceratops doesn't really have very large horns at all.

They really have an armored head.

This is an interesting one.

Linharaptor one, I had to get that moving.

And I remember having like, I think Protoceratops and Velociraptor and Linharaptor and a couple of other kind of regionally.

um, regionally, um, relevant species, regionally and temporally relevant species and having more move.

And then it was like, even to, I think the, the latest one where I did something like that one was, uh, I think it was Gallimimus or, or it might've been Tarbosaurus, which was like the part two.

And so in your office, what have you got?

Um, I've got a couple of Protoceratops skulls I didn't bring.

I've got a Tyrannosaurus foot [laughs] that I didn't bring.

Um, I've got two quite large boxes that I've just packed with casts of teeth and claws.

Um, it would be really great to get soft tissue on ceratopsians.

Like, I've written so much about Protoceratops in particular and the singling potential of their frill, but also the tail and other bits of it.

And- If you had the soft tissue and/or color, it wouldn't necessarily reveal that because some things have big signals, but they're not very bright colors.

But I suspect a bunch of them probably were, and it would be really nice to see, do we have contrasting colors or bright stripes or something like that? Um, that would be really, really great.

Man, those things would make one heck of a guard birdcat.

Coincidentally, the Gobi Desert boasts one of the richest fossil deposits in the world, which is where the remains of the Protoceratops can be found.

This dinosaur lived 80 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period, and was an ancestor of the more famous Triceratops.

This herbivorous creature measured six feet long and weighed 400 pounds, so about the same size as a very large wild boar.

Classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor hypothesized that the Scythians, while mining for gold, may have unearthed Protoceratops remains, sparking the griffin myth.

Both have beaked bird-like faces, yet walk on four legs like a mammal.

But not everyone buys this.

But like you said, it's gotta get onto Edmontosaurus, and I think what raptors really aim for, what they were designed for, was capturing prey, restraining it, and then kill blow right on the throat.

I think that was their main method, which is also shown in fossils with the famous dueling dinosaur, fighting dinosaurs with Velociraptor and Protoceratops.

Right.

It's not gonna happen this way with Edmontosaurus.