On Jan. 16, the day students returned from winter break, the CU Museum of Natural History unveiled a full-scale Triceratops skeleton in the lobby of the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Community (SEEC) building on CU Boulder’s East Campus. The dinosaur is a skeletal reconstruction cast from the bones of several Triceratops that once roamed the West. The free exhibit is open to the public. 

The Smithsonian Museum delivered the disassembled skeleton via truck to Boulder in 2022. A crew put it back together off-site before bringing it to its current SEEC location. 

“Everybody knows about Triceratops,” said Karen Chin, geological sciences professor and the museum’s paleontology curator. “But it’s not common in museums to see the whole animal. To see the scale of this dinosaur, and such a weird dinosaur, is very exciting.” 

CU's Triceratops

The first complete dinosaur skeleton displayed by the CU Museum of Natural History

High-resolution cast made of plaster, fiberglass and foam 

22 feet long and 9 feet tall

Cast from the bones of several partial Triceratops specimens found in the late 1800s

More about the Triceratops

12,000

pounds

Roamed the West from Colorado to Canada during the Cretaceous Period

30

Feet long

Had birdlike beaks to clip vegetation

Had teeth for grinding plants and trees

1887

The year a Colorado school teacher unearthed the first documented Triceratops fossils near Denver

Horns were most likely used for fighting among male Triceratops

100s

of teeth

The climate was warmer and more humid than today. Palms, flowering plants and ferns flourished.

66-68 million years ago

When the triceratops roamed the earth

Turtles, crocodiles and small nocturnal animals thrived in the environment.

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Photo by Casey A. Cass, illustrations by iStock

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Heard Around Campus 

“​​Just the other day I saw a little kid, probably in preschool, walk up to that dinosaur and her mouth just fell open.”

— Jaelyn Eberle, CU Museum of Natural History curator of fossil vertebrates, when discussing the final days visitors could visit the Triceratops skull on campus. The fossil moved back to its permanent home at the Smithsonian in May after more than 40 years at CU.

Sustainability at CU Boulder

2,900

Tons of recycling and compost diverted from landfills 

170

Zero Waste events produced on campus

2.7 million

student RTD bus trips

600+

hours spent during football season sorting waste into compost and recycling after home games

86%

of Folsom Field waste diverted from landfills on football game days

5,500

bikes repaired

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Origins: Stegosaurus 

You’d probably identify the giant wall-mounted fossil inside the Jerry Crail Johnson Earth Sciences & Map Library as a dinosaur. If you’re a dinosaur buff, you might even suspect it’s a Stegosaurus.

It’s better than that: The replica, one of just two in the world, depicts the most complete Stegosaurus skeleton ever found. 

Kenneth Carpenter (PhDPaleo’96) can tell you all about it.

In June 1992, Bryan Small, Carpenter’s assistant, was standing in a ravine in Garden Park, near Cañon City, Colorado, when he scraped a rock hammer across a bone, knocking it loose.

To his immense surprise, it turned out to be a fossilized vertebra of a Stegosaurus Stenops, an herbivorous dinosaur with rows of upright plates along its back that walked the Earth between 150 and 155 million years ago. The next day, they returned with shovels, jackhammers and chisels.

For the rest of the summer, Carpenter and a group of skilled volunteers from the museum and the Garden Park Paleontology Society spent long days (and some nights) chipping away at the rock.

With the help of a skilled mining crew, hundreds of hours of careful excavating and a heavy dose of creativity, Carpenter and team unearthed a skeleton that was nearly 80 percent complete — missing only the front two legs and a partial hind leg, which they hypothesize were snatched away by scavengers after the animal died.

When they finally made it to the tail, they found three of the four iconic tail spikes were still attached. For Carpenter, the fourth spike held the key to how the great dinosaur had died — a bone infection.

The summer-long dig was challenging: Apart from the skull and a few vertebra, most of the skeleton was buried under 15 feet of rock in a steep ravine in a remote area. Temperatures were often high, sometimes in the high 90s, and there were swarms of gnats, flash flooding and frequent thunderstorms.

But the researchers were too excited to care.

Once the skeleton was unearthed, the researchers had to find a way to get it out of the ravine and into the lab. Because of the steep terrain, using a backhoe or truck was out of the question. They could have broken the skeleton into pieces, but they were determined to keep the nearly completely intact skeleton as undisturbed as possible.

Photo by Deirdre O. Keating

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On Aug. 29, 2017 stunned construction workers unearthed a dinosaur horn at a site in Thornton, Colo., 30 minutes outside of Boulder.

The fossil remains originally were thought to be those of a Triceratops, but were found to belong to its close cousin Torosaurus instead. The discovery is the first recorded Torosaurus in Colorado, according to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. 

During the 12-day dig at the site, paleontologists and volunteers recovered 80 percent of the dinosaur’s skull and 15 percent of its body.  

“Finding a well-preserved dinosaur skull is a fairly rare event,” said CU paleontologist Karen Chin, who didn’t work on the dig, but was eager to hear the fossils were found in the Denver metro area.

More than 75 volunteers helped excavate and plaster the fossils for transport to the Denver museum, said Maura O’Neal (MJour’07), the museum’s communications and media relations manager, who also participated in the dig.   

The fossils will live in the museum’s permanent collections.

“This is the most complete Cretaceous-period skeleton ever to be found in Colorado,” said O’Neal. “By comparing it to other horned dinosaurs throughout the Rocky Mountain region, we’ll learn more about what life was like 66 million years ago in the area, and about the ecology and relationships of horned dinosaurs in the Mountain West.”

Photo courtesy Denver Museum of Nature & Science

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Karen Chin

CU paleontologist Karen Chin reconstructs the physical and social world of the big dinosaurs — in part by teasing out who ate whom.

How do you describe what you do?

My research focuses on trying to reconstruct what Mesozoic ecosystems were like. That’s the time when the big dinosaurs lived. I say ‘big dinosaurs’ because birds are still here, and birds are dinosaurs. A lot of the rock deposits I work on are around 75 million years old.

What sorts of questions are you asking?

Many of the specimens I study are fossil feces, which provide evidence for the feeding activities of ancient animals. Oftentimes dinosaur scientists focus on fossil bones and reconstructing what animals looked like, which is extremely important. But I like to look at the interactions of dinosaurs with the other, less charismatic organisms that they lived with. I’ve studied things like dung beetles and snails that fed on dinosaur dung and beetles that fed on dinosaur bones. Most recently we found some burrows that may have been made by parasites inside the gut contents of a dinosaur.

The first question I ask is, what is the evidence that a specimen is actually fossil feces? This might be the presence of chopped up dietary residues; it can be the presence of distinctive animal burrows; it can be the chemistry. The second question is, who might have produced it? For that, we look at the paleontological context — what bones are found in the same horizon? And then the third question is, if this is a coprolite [fossilized dung], what can it tell us?

Where are we finding dinosaur feces?

Coprolites have been found probably on every continent. Whether they’re big enough to confidently attribute to dinosaurs is another question.

Of the coprolites that you are most confident are dinosaur coprolites, what parts of the U.S. or the world do they tend to show up in?

In the Rocky Mountains. Montana, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming. Texas, even. I’m pretty confident that there are coprolites in other places. But they’re really challenging to recognize.

Are there particular dinosaur species you have found most useful?

Carnivore feces tend to preserve much more easily than feces from herbivores. This is counterintuitive, because there have been far more plant-eaters throughout the history of life. But there is something in the carnivore diet — the chemistry of the food can be conducive to preservation of the feces. And the most common coprolites are those from aquatic animals, like fish, crocodilians, turtles. Feces are most easily preserved if they are rapidly buried. Thus, dinosaur coprolites tend to be rare. I could probably count on two or three hands all of the herbivorous dinosaur coprolite deposits in the world that I know of.

What are some of the practical challenges you face in your work?

A lack of well-preserved fossils. You could have tons of coprolites, but if they’re poorly preserved, you’re not going to find interesting things in them!

At what point are you satisfied that, yes, this is a coprolite?

When there are multiple lines of evidence. These might include paleontological and geological context. The presence of chopped up possible dietary residues. Chemistry. The presence of activity from organisms that were feeding on the feces.

What sorts of tools do you use most?

My best tools are my microscopes. I have microscopes that I use to look at the surfaces of things. And if there is enough material and I have documented the specimens very carefully, I will cut them and make thin sections so that I can look at them with my transmitted light microscope and try to recognize cell structures of things that were eaten. I also do a lot of chemical analyses.

What do you do outside of work?

I’m an avid gardener and plant collector. I have a garden and probably have close to 100 plants inside the house. They take a long time to water and care for. Orchids, cactuses, bromeliads and other tropical plants.

Condensed and edited

Photo by Casey A. Cass 

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