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| Triceratops, Leiden, Netherlands |
Naturalis studies life on Earth through its vast natural history collection, and its dinosaur discoveries have given us something remarkable to talk about.
Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden traces its beginnings to 1820, when King William I founded the Netherlands’ National Museum of Natural History by bringing together existing collections and scientific cabinets.
Its holdings grew through research expeditions, collections from other Dutch institutions and gifts from private collectors. That history has a difficult side: some specimens were collected in colonial settings under circumstances Naturalis now investigates through provenance research.
Today, the collection holds more than 43 million objects, though only a fraction are on display. Visitors can meet Trix the T. rex and Triceratops in the Dinosaur Age gallery, explore mammoth fossils and other Ice Age animals, and discover how life has changed over billions of years.
It is there wonderful triceratops display you see in the photo here. It showcases Triceratops horridus: three horns, a broad bony frill, a sturdy plant eater’s body, and a face that has been a dinosaur icon for generations.
It lived in North America near the end of the Cretaceous, roughly 67 million years ago.
These fellows are some of my favourite dinosaurs. I had a lovely figurine of one that I played with as a youth and still sits on my shelf to this day.
We often picture Triceratops roaming in herds, but fossils had offered little firm evidence for that familiar scene. Then Naturalis researchers uncovered the remains of five individuals together in Wyoming. Naturalis excavated six Triceratops in Wyoming overall, but five were found together in the bonebed that became the museum’s herd.
The five Triceratops were found by a Naturalis Biodiversity Center expedition team on a ranch near Newcastle, Wyoming, in 2013. The team was searching for Tyrannosaurus fossils when it encountered Triceratops bones. Further excavation revealed remains of at least five individuals together; the work continued over several years under research leader Anne Schulp.
Anne Schulp is a vertebrate palaeontologist at Naturalis and a professor at Utrecht University. Trained in Earth Sciences, with a doctorate focused on mosasaurs, Schulp studies dinosaurs, ancient marine reptiles and fossil footprints, and continues to lead the research group investigating Naturalis’s Triceratops herd.
Years of excavation and study led them to conclude that these animals lived and died as a group. In 2024, Naturalis brought all five together for the first public display of this extraordinary herd.
That is the thrill of palaeontology: even the dinosaurs we think we know can surprise us. One fossil tells us about an animal. Five found together may tell us something about how they lived.
The herd’s Leiden exhibition ended in August 2025, and the fossils are now travelling internationally. This photo captures a special chapter in their story.
Image ID: 2559349211