104 The Great Spiked Dinosaur 



the Mid-Cretaceous time. The skull was over six 

 feet in length, with a great horn core over the 

 center of the nose, twenty-four inches high, and 

 six inches in diameter at the base. But stranger 

 than all, six horn-cores radiating from the crest 

 behind where it is four and a half feet wide. The 

 central horn-cores are the largest, twenty-two 

 inches long, the next pair twenty, and the outer- 

 most fourteen inches wide. All these horn-cores 

 were covered in life with horn, lengthening them 

 materially. The crest, from between the center 

 of the eyes horns is four feet long, while the por- 

 tion of the skull in front is only two feet. The 

 narrow bar that carries the spikes behind, is nar- 

 row and heavy, thinned down with the central 

 and marginal bars to form large openings. The 

 skull too, as in Chasamosaurus is dug out into 

 caves. Only a thin septum of bone separate the 

 brain case from the central air chambers, there 

 were no attached orbital horns, but cup-like de- 

 pressions, as if the horns had dropped out, hav- 

 ing been ossified from a separate center. All the 

 bones of the skull show vascular grooves, as if 

 the entire skull was sheathed in horn making an 

 impenetratable shield. In the old restoration of 

 Triceratops the neck is enlarged to fasten se- 

 curely into the neck-frill or crest. To me such 

 an idea is absolutely absurd. The round occipi- 

 tal condyle enabled the animal to bend the head 

 in any direction at the atlas vertebra, as in the 

 four limbed mammals of today, that have to put 



