This Saturday is Aquilops Day!

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day.

Before Jurassic World Rebirth was released, I was interviewed by the folks at the SNOMNH about Aquilops. Andy Farke and I got quoted a few places (here, here, and here). I was really happy to see Scott Madsen get some attention (here) — if he hadn’t found and prepped the fossil, Aquilops wouldn’t be a thing, and we’d know a lot less about the earliest ceratopsians in North America.

It was nice to see that one quote of mine get around, but the rest of the interview was just sitting in email, so I got permission from the SNOMNH folks to post it here.

When the specimen was first discovered in the field what did the team think it was initially? Were they looking for anything specific in the area?

I wasn’t on the expedition in the summer of 1997 when Scott Madsen discovered the Aquilops type specimen — everything I know about this I learned from Scott and from Dr. Cifelli later. I did go out to the Cloverly Formation with the OMNH crew in the summer of 1998. To answer those questions in reverse order: even in 1998 we were looking for anything and everything. I did a lot of prospecting that summer with Scott and the rest of the crew, just walking outcrops for hours in hopes of finding either fossil skeletons or a promising microsite, someplace that preserved a lot of tiny bones and especially teeth that we could retrieve by screenwashing the sediment. Dr. Cifelli had been very successful getting tiny teeth of early mammals, lizards, snakes, and more from microsites in the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah and, to a lesser extent, from the Antlers Formation in southeast Oklahoma, and we were hoping to replicate that success in the Cloverly. But we also were not going to turn down larger fossils like skulls and skeletons.

According to Scott’s account of the discovery (link), everyone initially assumed it was a Zephyrosaurus, a small plant-eating dinosaur distantly related to duckbills. It was only during the process of preparing the skull out of the surrounding rock that Scott found the beak and realized that it was an early horned dinosaur — the earliest anywhere in the world outside of Asia.

It’s more rare or unusual to find a dinosaur’s skull relatively intact isn’t it? Do we know or can we guess what circumstances caused this specimen’s skull to be preserved without the rest of its body?

It does often seem like feast or famine with dinosaur skulls. There are numerous dinosaurs for which we have most of the skeleton but no skull, and some others for which we have a skull but nothing else. For relatively large-headed animals like Aquilops, the skull and the body are basically two big masses connected by a weaker linkage — the neck. It’s common for the head to become separated from the body after death, as the carcass is moved around by scavengers or simply by flowing water. The same thing happens to human bodies in forensic situations.

What adaptations did Aquilops and other early ceratopsians have that made it so successful? What environmental pressures caused such a small, unassuming dinosaur to eventually evolve into some of the largest land animals that ever lived?

Ceratopsians had nifty teeth that could efficiently cut up plants, like walking around with paired sets of garden shears in their mouths. And to power those shears, they had enlarged attachments for jaw muscles at the backs of their skulls, which were the first beginnings of the frills that things like Triceratops and Pentaceratops would take to such flamboyant lengths later on. But even the little cat- and pig-sized ceratopsians were pretty successful, based on the high diversity of early ceratopsians in China and Mongolia — the ancestors and cousins of Aquilops.

The combination of big jaw muscles, shearing teeth, sharp beak, and pointy skull bits worked well across a wide range of body sizes, from little tiny things like Aquilops to the later rhino- and elephant-sized horned dinosaurs. I think it’s particularly interesting that even in the Late Cretaceous, generally Aquilops-like small ceratopsians such as Leptoceratops were still thriving alongside giants like Triceratops. So it’s not the case that big ceratopsians replaced small ceratopsians, rather that the range of successful body plans expanded to include big multi-horned four-leggers. But the little ones were still doing fine, more than 40 million years after Aquilops existed.

How accurate do you think Aquilops’ representation will be on the big screen? What would be the biggest challenge in realistically portraying Aquilops in film — locomotion, coloration or something else?

We have a lot of advantages when it comes to reconstructing the little early ceratopsians. From Asia we have multiple complete skeletons of close relatives of Aquilops, like Psittacosaurus, and some of those have fossilized impressions of the skin, including scales, color patterns, even protofeathers or “dinofuzz”. So we can reconstruct those animals with a lot more certainty than we can most of larger and more famous dinosaurs like Spinosaurus or Dilophosaurus. There isn’t a single Dilophosaurus in the world in which the tippy-top of the skull is intact, so we still don’t know the full shape and extent of the head crest (more on that here).

From the footage I’ve seen in the trailers, I think the moviemakers did a pretty darned good job with Aquilops. The body proportions look good, the colors and movements are plausible, nothing set off any red flags for me. I do wonder about disposition. A lot of small plant-eaters today are pretty skittish, and they can fight aggressively when cornered — think about the attitude of a bantam rooster, or an angry goose. My guess is that a live Aquilops would be so good at hiding that humans moving through its environment would never even see it. But for the sake of getting to see “my” dinosaur on the big screen, I’m glad the moviemakers went another way.

One more question for fun… if you were consulted about creating this dinosaur’s on-screen persona, what kind of personality do you think it would or should have had? Nervous? Intelligent? Are there any modern animals that might have a similar personality?

When Dr. Farke, who was the lead author on the Aquilops project, and I were coordinating with Brian Engh, who did all of the art for the paper and the press release, we wanted to show a person holding an Aquilops to give a sense of scale. One of the things we talked about is that living animals with beaks or sharp teeth have a tendency to bite when they feel threatened. The core ceratopsian superpower was having very powerful jaw muscles pushing scissor-like teeth and a wickedly sharp beak. One of Brian’s preliminary sketches showed an Aquilops jumping out of a person’s arms and nipping their fingers on the way. As much as I love the idea of an adorable, friendly “cat-ceratops”, I think a real-life Aquilops would have no problem kicking, scratching, and especially biting if it got cornered by a human. Imagine a raccoon with the head of a snapping turtle — would you want that in your backpack?

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One thing occurred to me after the interview, and after I saw the movie: the filmmakers may have gotten Dolores’s personality more correct than I thought. In the movie, the island had been uninhabited by people for 17years, and presumably Dolores is younger than that. She’d have no reason to fear people, and given the wiiiide variation in animal personalities, it wouldn’t surprise me if some Aquilops were more inquisitive than skittish. I still don’t think I’d want a cat-sized biting machine in my backpack; as Xavier says in the movie, “That may or may not be a terrible idea.”

So anyway, if you’re in or near central Oklahoma this weekend, you could do a lot worse than swinging by the Sam Noble Museum to enjoy Aquilops Day. I myself am planning on giving a short virtual presentation there — watch this space for more. And since I’ve linked to more than one YouTube video already in this post, go watch Gabriel Santos’s awesome short on Aquilops — it’s good for you.

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/07/17/this-saturday-is-aquilops-day/