Dave Hone

It's a cast and a mold taken.

So yeah, this is 100% accurate to the original specimen, or at least extraordinarily accurate to the original specimen.

Young guy.

Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, at full size, it's going to be like pig or sheep size.

So big, but not massive.

But I've got it partly because it's affordable, because I can't afford to buy the big skeletons and skulls.

But I've done a huge amount of work on it.

And in part, it goes back to those earlier conversations about...

populations and if you really want to understand animals you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these animals looks like and protoceratops is i would argue probably the only dinosaur where we can really do that or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal as an analog we've got well over 100 good skeletons though not

probably only about 70 or 80 in really accessible museums that's still a hell of a lot we have everything from here's a tiny baby on this is a really not cheap and nasty 3d print i had made but that's a hatchling sized one or not much bigger than a hatchling sized one

all the way up to the big adults we've now got embryos as well which we didn't have until about 10 years ago so we've got embryonic animals all the way up to big adults they're all pretty much from one place in mongolia and they are as far as we can tell from a relatively narrow window in time only about 100 000 years which in the grand scheme of things is very close

So you've got one population from one place from one time with 100 animals from embryos up to big adults.

So now if you want to look at, as I do, something like sexual selection and when does growth of the signal kick in and at what size and what evidence for dimorphism, well, suddenly you've got a population.

You've got something you can work with.

And that's why parasitoceratops is so important.

And I think way more important than even a lot of my fellow paleontologists realize.

And I genuinely think we should be pouring a lot more research into them because they can tell us stuff that pretty much no other dinosaur can.

Because you have the population data.

And we can treat it as a population.