Planning Pachyrhinosaurus

“Frick off, predator!” From Prehistoric Planet.

Having rewatched some Prehistoric Planet recently, I’m now very inspired to illustrate Pachyrhinosaurus (specifically the Perot’s pachyrhinosaur) after Allosaurus and "Anatosaurus," fitting for Christmas. I love how the show depicted this Alaskan ceratopsian. The marine iguana-like colours on its face, the aggressive kazoo-like bellows and those prickly quills on its back just prove it further as a strangely unique dinosaur and it might as well become a new favourite of mine. The quills (which are based on the discovery of quills on the tail of a Psittacosaurus fossil) are especially my favourite feature because they render the dino a bit like a huge prehistoric porcupine, and might fill in some role of defence if you have less horn than other ceratopsians. Several palaeoart now speculatively reconstruct the Perot’s pachyrhinosaur with a shaggy coat of protofeathers to keep warm from the Arctic cold, but it wasn’t like Alaska or the poles in general were the same back then. The Late Cretaceous was a greenhouse stage with a warmer, generally tropical climate than today and a lack of permanent ice sheets, and it is evident that polar regions like Alaska were more like today’s temperate rainforests at that time, far warmer and wetter than the modern-esque tundra often reconstructed, so I’d stick with a scaly pachyrhinosaur. I also put great spiky quills on the tail of a Triceratops I did, but in that case it’s just unlikely and unpredictable (like a lot of other cautiously speculative features I put on it that I’m now dissatisfied with). Why still have your quills inconveniently on the tail after so many million years? Not to mention the large range of thick-hided, pebbly skin impressions we have of the dinosaur, though I am not sure how well feathers and quills preserve in three-dimensional skin impressions. Still though, skin is variable within related animals and Pachyrhinosaurus is different enough from Triceratops. I might just follow Prehistoric Planet’s way, which though a little speculative with the quills isn’t implausible, not to mention this could be a different defence for this ceratopsian, having a weaker frill, no horns and a smaller size. I also really want to splash on the marine iguana-like colours. What do you guys think?