Styracosaurus
As a Styracosaurus your face would do most of the talking: a horn on your nose up to half a metre long and a halo of spikes fanning out from your frill.
A crown of spikes
Styracosaurus albertensis, named by Lawrence Lambe in 1913, lived about 75.5–75 million years ago in what is now Alberta, Canada, in the Dinosaur Park Formation. It was a centrosaurine ceratopsian about 5–5.5 metres long and roughly 2–3 tonnes.
Its name means “spiked lizard”. Four to six long spikes projected from the rear of the frill, and the nose horn could reach about 50–60 centimetres. The brow horns, by contrast, were small.
Display before defence
A frill pierced by large openings and fringed with spikes would make a poor shield. Most researchers see the ornamentation mainly as signalling: telling members of your species apart from similar centrosaurines, showing maturity and impressing mates or rivals. The nose horn could certainly have been a weapon against predators such as the tyrannosaurids Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus, which shared its floodplains.
Each Styracosaurus seems to have had its own variation on the spike pattern – differences in length and angle are common between specimens – so your frill may have worked a bit like a face.
Living in a crowd
Centrosaurines are often found in bonebeds containing dozens or hundreds of individuals of one species, suggesting they lived and travelled in herds, at least seasonally. A Styracosaurus bonebed in Alberta fits that pattern. Mass deaths during river floods or droughts may explain such sites – a reminder that herd life had its own catastrophes.
Your diet would have been ferns, cycads and other low, tough plants, chopped up by a sharp beak and rows of shearing teeth. Like other ceratopsians, you would hatch small and grow your spikes and horn only as you approached adulthood, so the full crown was a badge of maturity – which strongly supports the display interpretation.
