CU Boulder’s beloved Triceratops returns home to Smithsonian

By Daniel Strain

This year, CU Boulder said goodbye to a beloved member of the campus community—this one had three horns, a wide frill and was dug up in Wyoming in 1891.

That resident was, of course, the fossil skull of a Triceratops dinosaur that had sat on display at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History for decades. In May, a team from the Smithsonian Institution, which lent the skull to CU Boulder in 1981, disassembled the skeleton and shipped it back to Washington, D.C.

Jaelyn Eberle, a paleontologist, curator, professor and interim director of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, said: “It’s going to a good place: home.”

But don’t worry, there are still plenty of things to see at the museum, which holds 5 million objects in its collections, including more than 100,000 vertebrate fossils.

On loan from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Department of Paleobiology. Catalog Number: USNM V 4928. GUID: http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/3daa951cc-271a-4ed4-b262-f395fcb1a7d0

Photo by Suzanne Balog