STL Science Center

STL Science Center

22 December 2017

Few Images

Han, et al. 2015
There is a lack of images for Hualianceratops for one main reason: there is very little skeletal material known and that material is almost all in the middle portion of the skull. Any ornamentation or odd body shapes are unknown to us with the material we possess at this time. Therefore, instead of showing a really imaginative or well done image that we have not seen this week. Instead, you will find an image from the descriptive paper summarizing the placement of the bones within the living animal's skull. This reconstruction of the skull labels the known material of the skull also; quadrate (q), postorbital (po), jugal (j), maxilla (ma), dentary (d), and predentary (pd). The scale bar of 5 cm shows us how small this animal was as well. The entire head was not much longer than about 15 cm, which is fairly small for what we think of dinosaurs. However, there were many small dinosaurs about this size and, for many lineages, starting off small was quite normal before we see the enormous hulking dinosaurs of later generations, in this case giants like Triceratops.

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