A Rainy Face-Off

About this drawing

Few matchups in history get people as fired up as the T-Rex and triceratops. These two shared western North America about 66 million years ago, in the final days of the dinosaurs, and they really were rivals, not just a cool scene from a picture book.

The proof is right there in the bones. Triceratops skulls and frills have turned up with T-Rex tooth marks gouged into them. Some of those wounds even show signs of healing, which means the plant eater got away and lived to tell the tale.

Taking down a triceratops was no easy job. An adult weighed several tons and carried three horns, two of them as long as a baseball bat or more. Its huge frill may have shielded part of the neck. A T-Rex probably went after young, sick or distracted animals when it could, the way lions pick their targets in a herd of buffalo.

Other bite marks tell a stranger story. It appears a T-Rex sometimes pulled the frill away to get at the rich neck muscles of an animal that was already dead. So scientists now think it both hunted and scavenged, like many predators today. The whole rivalry came to an end when a giant asteroid slammed into Earth and wiped out both sides.

• dinosaurs
• t-rex
• triceratops
• rain