Jurassic Park

The first discovered skull of an American Triceratops (a Late Cretaceous-age dinosaur) was found by John Bell Hatcher in 1888. These plant-eating creatures had enormous horns and weighed around 5 tons.

Between 1889-1892, Hatcher collected more than 40 skulls and partial skeletons. Within a year of its discovery, O.C. Marsh (the first professor of paleontology in the United States) had named the creature Triceratops (Latin for "three-horned face") and published a description of it. At a time when the state of Wyoming had no roads, Hatcher and his team of assistants loaded the skeletons into horse-drawn wagons. The nearest railroad station was 40 miles away.

One of Hatcher's fossils contains the surprisingly small brain cavity of a Triceratops. When he studied this specimen, in 1920, Charles W. Gillmore observed:

...although having immense heads the brain is smaller in proportion to it than in any known vertebrate animal, being but little larger than a man’s fist.

Using many of Hatcher’s collected fossils, Gillmore and a colleague prepared the world’s first mounted Triceratops for the Smithsonian Institute. The unfortunate creature - at the time it lived - was the prey of Tyrannosaurus rex.