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Thanks to its dramatic museum displays, most of us can only imagine a Triceratops using its horns and sprawling neck frills to fend off a hungry Tyrannosaurus rex. But some scholars believe Triceratopses also used their deadly headgear against each other. Like dueling deer waving their antlers, Triceratopses may have interlocked their antlers to impress mates or defeat rivals.

While scientists have long speculated about such behavior, conclusive evidence of these conflicts is difficult to find. But in a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific ReportsA team of Italian scientists describes what they believe is an open scar from one of these ancient wars on the neck of a high-profile Triceratops known as “Big John.”

Discovered by commercial fossil hunters while working on the South Dakota cliffside in 2014 and named after the farmer who owned the land, Big John received little fanfare until an Italian fossil preparation firm purchased and restored the dinosaur remains in 2020. largest specimen of Triceratops ever discovered (its skull is more than five feet long), Big John was sold to an anonymous bidder for $7.7 million last October – the highest price ever for a non-Tyrannosaurus rex fossil.

In addition to its staggering size and price, the creature’s skull has a large crescent-shaped hole at the base of the neck frill. While many Triceratops skulls have similar holes, few have been studied in depth, according to Ruggero D’Anastasio, a paleopathologist at D’Annunzio University in Chieti–Pescara, Italy, and author of the study.

There has been a long debate over what causes these gaps in a Triceratops’ frill. Some believe these are traces of interspecies struggles or close encounters with predators. Others think it could be signs of infectious diseases or potentially age-related bone destruction. In the Big John case, the bone around the cavity is covered with rough, plaque-like deposits that are a sign that the area was once inflamed.

But to determine whether the inflammation was caused by disease or traumatic injury, the researchers had to dig deeper. They examined samples of bone tissue taken from the periphery of the cavity in microscopic detail, looking for telltale signs of healing and bone remodeling.

Examining the samples under an electron microscope, the team observed that the bone closer to the opening was more porous and filled with blood vessels than bone farther away, indicating that the cavity was framed by newly formed bone. They also detected small pits that commonly appear when bones are reshaped by specialized cells called osteoclasts.

All these signs point to a recovering Triceratops. Dr. “The healing stages of bone are similar to those observed in mammals, including humans,” D’Anastasio said. “We are dealing with a traumatic injury that certainly did not cause the death of Triceratops.”

Researchers believe the keyhole-shaped cavity was pierced into Big John’s frill by the horn of another Triceratops. The unique location of the wound led the researchers to assume that the ruffle was punctured from behind.

But Big John was stabbed, the team estimates, based on the healing of the bone, that the dinosaur survived for another six months. When the sluggish dinosaur died out about 66 million years ago, it was buried in sediment in the Hell Creek Formation, a fossil bed that accumulated towards the end of the dinosaur’s reign.

The Big John example is among a growing list. huge dinosaur fossils that go for huge sums of money to private buyers. These staggering amounts price public museums and universities, creating barriers between perfectly preserved specimens and paleontologists.

With Big John, for example, the bone tissue samples analyzed in the new study are stored in the Chieti University Museum collection, but the whereabouts of the larger skeleton is unknown. According to Denver Fowler, curator of the Badlands Dinosaur Museum in North Dakota, this hinders paleontologists’ ability to properly examine the new findings. “Actually, no one can go and see this pathological area for themselves,” he said. “Repeatability is the bottom line of science.”

These concerns led the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology to discourage researchers from studying the fossils in the private sector.

Dr. Fowler thinks that if even a small fraction of the money and attention spent on Big John were given to paleontologists, it would help them discover, prepare, and study the more scientifically important Triceratops fossils.

“I expect many museums to have samples of the impromptu, better quality and more substantial than the Big John,” he said, “but resource shortages leave these specimens in field jackets.”