The Complete Cinematic History of Triceratops (Part One)

Dinosaurs in Film: Triceratops

 

When most people think of the ceratopsians, or horned dinosaurs, they think of Triceratops. It was one of the last and largest of its kind, living in the late Cretaceous period next to another one of the most famous dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex. In reality, Triceratops was just one of many, many diverse species of dinosaurs sporting an array of horns and shields on their skulls. One of the reasons Triceratops became the most famous is because of that pairing with T. rex. The biggest carnivore in the environment surely preyed on one of the largest herbivores living alongside it, right? So, early paleontologists posited that the two dinosaurs were mortal enemies. The Rex had massive jaws filled with teeth, and Triceratops had a shield to protect its vulnerable neck from those jaws, and could defend itself with those horns, or even mortally wound a Rex with them.

This idea had instant appeal, and became a long-lasting one. Triceratops, like Stegosaurus and so many other species before it, was more than capable of fighting back against a predator, and the battle between two creatures so massive would have shook the earth. Even as paleontologists continued to unearth new fossils, study the bones more closely, and reevaluate old ideas (maybe Triceratops and the other horned dinosaurs used their horns and shields more for display and telling each other apart than for fighting big eaters, maybe T. rex preyed upon sicker, weaker, or younger individuals instead of recklessly attacking a herd of healthy adults) the idea of T. rex fighting Triceratops has never left the public conscience, and that’s largely because of early film depictions.

As we’ll see throughout the cinematic history of the Three-Horned Face, many of the ideas about ceratopsians didn’t change as the years went by. Filmmakers diverged from using Triceratops as more species became better known, though it remains one of the most recognizable dinosaurs to this day.

 

The Black-and-White Era (1910’s-1940’s)

 

Triceratops got its start in the movie business alongside T. rex in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918). This Three-Horn is pretty plain, with smooth skin, a shield that’s mostly flat, and, given the era it was made in, no colour. Even though it didn’t stand out visually and had a tail that inaccurately dragged on the ground, it shared the screen with the Tyrant Lizard King and held its own in a battle, and the same can be said about the its next role. The Lost World (1925) has a similarly bland Three-Horn, but this time there is a whole family of them, and they are shown protecting their young from a hungry Allosaurus. For it being such an early entry in the dinosaur movie genre, this depiction of them being caring parents instead of bloodthirsty monsters is pretty ahead of the times. But, dino creator Willis O’Brien wanted to make as many dinosaurs as he could into terrifying creatures, so that meant herbivores usually acted just as vicious as carnivores, as we’ll see from the next example—but before we get to that, real quick, there’s another peaceful plant-eating horned dinosaur in Lost World, called Agathaumus.

The Agathaumus is a ceratopsian known from very little fossil remains, and today it’s considered a dubious genus, meaning it may not be its own species at all, the remains could actually just be from a Triceratops, but not enough evidence exists to confirm or deny it. Paleo artists Charles R. Knight painted an Agathaumus which was used as inspiration for Willis O’Brien’s stop motion model featured in The Lost World. This thing looks way more impressive compared to the Triceratops. It has a spiky shield, bigger horns, and very detailed scaly skin. Its posture may still be wrong, but it certainly stands out. Anyway, it gets attacked by that same Allosaurus that tried to eat the baby Triceratops and successfully kills the predator. It doesn’t get much time to enjoy the victory though before a T.rex shows up on the scene and brutally forces it to the ground and begins eating it before its even dead.

Son of Kong (1933) traded out Triceratops for another ceratopsian, Styracosaurus. The first King Kong didn’t have a ceratopsian species at all, but the Styracosaurus model that appears in the sequel was used for test filming in the original film, though ultimately never made it into the final cut. A Styracosaurus is notably different from Triceratops by the number of horns on its face and the structure of its shield. It had one very long nose horn and no horns above its eyes. Its shield had numerous large spikes jutting off the edges, making it look even more fearsome than Triceratops. Its scene in Son of Kong is short, but the design of the model is excellent, and is actually more accurate than later examples.

Creating a stop motion model for a dinosaur film in the black-and-white era was costly and time-consuming, so cheapskate filmmakers invented a new, cheaper, easier method: glue plastic horns and frills on lizards and place them on miniature sets, film them at a slower frame rate to make them look larger and heavier, and insert roars. Boom, you have giant prehistoric lizard-like dinos for your film! The first really notable example of this technique is One Million B.C. (1940), which was nominated for an Academy award for its effects. Today, the effects don’t hold up at all, and the abuse the animals were subjected to is evident, which makes it even more dated and difficult to watch. The effect to achieve the “Triceratops” was a pig dressed in a rubber suit. These lizard-dinos would herald the next era and be examples of the way Triceratops was most often represented during that time.

 

The Silly Lizard Era (1940’s-1960’s)

 

Before we get to the glut of silly lizards, we have the first animated Triceratops, in The Rite of Spring from Disney’s Fantasia (1940). These Three-Horns have shields with bony knobs along the edges, which was a design choice left out of earlier depictions, but the knobs are present on fossil skulls, and most designs from here on out include them to some degree. Rite of Spring also includes some babies, which is interesting to see yet again. Unlike some other large herbivorous dinosaurs, Triceratops was mainly shown to be a caring parent, rather than switch back and forth between a lumbering, dimwitted plant eater and a vicious killing machine.

Normally I stick mainly to chronological order when going through these prehistoric cinematic histories, but here I’m going to diverge from that a little in order to group the main three films for which this era gets its designation. King Dinosaur (1955) has a Godzilla-sized iguana (only intended to seem that big, but the effect doesn’t work) standing on its back legs, and it has a large nose horn. Is it supposed to be a two-legged Triceratops or Styracosaurus? Who knows? The remake of The Lost World (1960) takes it a step further and has lizards dressed up as dinos that are actually supposed to be specific species. A monitor lizard plays a Triceratops, complete with a shield, as well as back spikes that look like they belong to Stegosaurus. It fights a caiman that has little Triceratops horns above its eyes, plus spikes and a sail down its back. The two “dinosaurs” look ridiculous, and the one that takes the cake is at the end, which is a monitor lizard with three horns glued to its face. Well, the adult is played by a monitor lizard, the baby is played by a gecko with the same horn arrangement. At least they got the number of horns right for a Triceratops…but then guess what the characters refer to it as? A T. rex. I shake my head. The remake One Million Years B.C. (1966) re-used a bit of the same giant lizard method from the original film, but also included stop motion dinosaurs created by Ray Harryhausen, and these are much more impressive.

The cavemen characters end up in the middle of a prehistoric battle between a Triceratops and a Ceratosaurus. Neither creature is to scale, they never lived at the same time, and it doesn’t matter, because it makes for one of the best dinosaur battles of the era. The idea of Triceratops fighting a big meat-eater is there, but it’s neat to see a different species from T. rex trying to bring it down. There’s no music, only the roars and hisses fill the air, along with the thuds and crunches as they clash, the Ceratosaurus biting at the horns and shield of the Triceratops. The carnivore ends up getting impaled on those pointy horns, which become coated in blood, and the Triceratops wins. This was a great victory for the Three-Horned dinosaur, in more ways than one. It is easily one of the best scenes to feature Triceratops in any film.

Unlike in the Black-and-White era, the ceratopsian dinosaurs had plenty of variety in the way they looked, even though Triceratops was the main species to be featured. Lost Continent (1951) had Three-Horns with unique shields that were ribbed rather than flat, and Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) featured a Styracosaurus with a shield that was made up entirely of spikes.

In Part Two, we’ll see how Hollywood diverged from using Triceratops most often, and new horned dinosaurs were given the spotlight. Stay tuned!