The Triceratops is a lie

[USAOROTC]

http://gizmodo.com/5601514/the-trice...other-dinosaur


Scientists are saying that the Triceratops dinosaur—you know, the three horned one—was actually a juvenile form of a Torosaurus, the three horned dinosaur you don't know. Apparently, dinosaurs' skulls can shape-shift.

The scientists, John Scannella and Jack Horner, believe that the Torosaurus and Triceratops are actually of the same species. According to the them, as a Triceratops aged, its horns and frill became more similar to that of a Torosaurus. Short becomes long, saw-edged becomes smoothed and so on. Having them be the same species would explain why there were never any young Torosaurus fossils discovered.

The duo say there is a clear transition from triceratops into torosaurus as the animals grow older. For example, the oldest specimens of triceratops show a marked thinning of the bone where torosaurus has holes, suggesting they are in the process of becoming fenestrated

Scientists sure enjoy crushing my childhood memory of The Land Before Time (they nixed Brontosaurus a while back). Hopefully they won't delete Triceratops too. [New Scientist via BoingBoing]

Send an email to Casey Chan, the author of this post, at cchan@gizmodo.com.


The adult



The juvenile

[softlynow]

Having them be the same species would explain why there were never any young Torosaurus fossils discovered.

That or Satan's just a sloppy sumbitch.

[Xian]

STOP DESTROYING MY CHILDHOOD DINOSAURS SCIENCE!

I think half of the ones i knew as a child no longer exist....

[Tasmaniac]

I reserve judgment until Theropods weighs in on this topic.

[SubliminalHorn]

Meh, pretty much the same

[KaiserSoze]

I'm still recovering from Pluto no longer being a planet, and now this!!???!!!11!1!!??!

[longhornjoe03]

Wait. What about the brontosaurus?

[oobe]

I don't give a shit if one of them gets nixed, but they need to keep the name Triceratops and drop that other jerkass name.

[USAOROTC]

by the way Billy thinks this is bullshit

[USAOROTC]

Wait. What about the brontosaurus?

go here http://www.wisegeek.com/was-the-bron...l-dinosaur.htm

[The Mave]

I don't care what science says.

They're not taking Uncle Beasley away. Fuckers.

[Teddy Salad]

I don't care what science says.

They're not taking Uncle Beasley away. Fuckers.

Holy crap I remember my 2nd grade teacher reading that to my class.

[Mike_Tyson]

3 horns never play with longnecks.

[MNLonghorn10]

this thread made me horny

[Montag]

yall should totally drop Bevo and make this beast your mascot when the cloning tech comes around. What's better than a two horned it's-what's-for-dinner mascot? a bad ass fucking dinosaur with THREE motherfucking horns wrecking shit all over the place. Fuck torosaurus, rename that shit bevosaurus and make it your own.

[jimmyjazz]

You just ruined my son's life. Way to go, asshole.

[PatrickMcHorn]

You just ruined my son's life. Way to go, asshole.

Still thinking about how I'm going to break this news to my daughter.

[dpierce37]

Hmmmmmm...this is bullshit!


HA

[USAOROTC]

You just ruined my son's life. Way to go, asshole.

:) ha

[MNLonghorn10]

You just ruined my son's life. Way to go, asshole.

you did by taking your kid to chilis

[ajax]

The Triceratops is a lie

[NCAAFBALLROX]

I reserve judgment until Theropods weighs in on this topic.

Yes.

I'm still recovering from Pluto no longer being a planet, and now this!!???!!!11!1!!??!

Nice.

[austintx71]

No one gets fenestrated without consequences.

[Huckleberry]

I don't give a shit if one of them gets nixed, but they need to keep the name Triceratops and drop that other jerkass name.

This. Fortunately I think precedence would make this the obvious way to go as the Triceratops was named first in 1889 and the Torosaurus in 1891. So the Triceratops isn't a lie, the Torosaurus is a lie.

[phdhorn]

Wut?

[phdhorn]

I'm still recovering from Pluto no longer being a planet, and now this!!???!!!11!1!!??!

Don't let the bastards win!:

Welcome to the main webpage for the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet! We here at SP3 believe strongly that Pluto's status as a planet should not be in question. For over seventy-five years schoolchildren all over the world have learned that our solar system has nine planets. Pluto's status as a planet has sparked the human imagination for decades. With this year's launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and the naming of Pluto's second and third moon, now is not the time to downgrade Pluto's status.

Please join us on our mission to keep Pluto a planet and find out what you can do to support our noble cause.

http://www.plutoisaplanet.org/

I don't know about you, but they'll have to pull Pluto the Planet out of my cold, dead hands.

[My Dixie Wrecked]

What about Raptor Jesus?

[DieUCLA98]

^ Not pleased with this news. [Ducky]Nope nope nope.[/Ducky]

[Steel Shank]

they nixed Brontosaurus a while back

I think I'll go out to the garage and knock out a case of Bud Light.

[bernorange]

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

[USAOROTC]

The Velociraptor didn't hunt in packs, wasn't that smart, and was basically a fucking chicken.... Fuck you Jurassic Park....

Did the raptors in Jurassic Park III actually exist, and if so when? Also, were they as intelligent as the movie suggests? Were there "raptors"? Yes, there was a group of animals called dromaeosaurs which included animals such as Velociraptor. Velociraptor was actually much smaller than the "velociraptors" in the movie; it was about the size of a medium-sized dog (75 lbs. or so). But there were big dromaeosaurs roughly the size of the movie "raptors."

The dromaeosaurs lived from the Late Jurassic (150 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous (65 million years ago). They are thought to be one of the dinosaur groups that is very closely related to birds, because they have long arms and large brains (as well as feathers, we now know) like birds.

We don't really think that dromaeosaurs were "smarter than dolphins, smarter than primates" as a paleontologist in Jurassic Park III claims. They had modestly large brains but those brains were nowhere near as elaborate as the brains of mammals or even most modern birds. If relative brain size is any measure of intelligence, dromaeosaurs were just a little smarter than typical dinosaurs. Not geniuses by mammalian standards...


http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/buzz/popular.html

So Raptor Jesus is a false God....

[Viper]

So Raptor Jesus is a false God....

I think it was Matthew 7:15 that said "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in bird's clothing"

[Ag with kids]

[ousuxndallas]

Scientists were wrong about something? No. Way.

[Staboned]

Scientists were wrong about something? No. Way.

don't worry homer, jesus loves both of them.

[Messi]

Folks who get frustrated at scientific findings crack me up.

Daggum nerds bunching up in they oversized labcoats trickin' us good people with fancy methodologies and authoritative snobbery.

[Mike_Tyson]

I guess the next thing you'll tell me is that the dinosaur that did in Newman in Jurassic Park 1 is fake, too.

[USAOROTC]

I guess the next thing you'll tell me is that the dinosaur that did in Newman in Jurassic Park 1 is fake, too.

lol...yes, this was the first thing that crushed my soul as a child

"The spitter is dilophosaurus, a dinosaur that was really the first big meat-eater, 20 feet long and as far as we know didn't spit poison or have a neck frill that fanned out"

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4759

[texasdago]

oh no... what will I ever do.

[TexasEd]

crap.

I guess the Chinese need to retool all their plastic dinosaur molds.

[Staboned]

Folks who get frustrated at scientific findings crack me up.

Daggum nerds bunching up in they oversized labcoats trickin' us good people with fancy methodologies and authoritative snobbery.

look at the post by Ousuxndallas just above there. flat out points out the problem with his own stupid. grumpy because some 'science' is wrong and more 'science' corrected it. it doesn't even mean this is right - but this douche can't quite grasp people trying to actually figure things out.

[Ghost of LL]

I'm about to defenestrate some paleontologists for destroying everything I thought I knew in my childhood.

This is all fucking bullshit.

[HornsOverIthaca]

That was like...my favorite dinosaur...I had models...

[naija]

For a second I thought mop had started posting here.

[theropods]

This. Fortunately I think precedence would make this the obvious way to go as the Triceratops was named first in 1889 and the Torosaurus in 1891. So the Triceratops isn't a lie, the Torosaurus is a lie.

Yes, Triceratops has priority since it was the original name. I've pretty much always thought that there was a good chance Torosaurus was just a really big Triceratops. The differences between them are not overwhelming to me and none of them are inconsistent with the idea that they are the same animal and it's just a bigger form.

There are 2 types of paleontologists when it comes to naming animals, lumpers and splitters that reflect different views on the accuracy and completeness of our data as well as concepts about species. Splitters tend to look for and emphasize minor differences between animals and name them separate species. Lumpers tend to clump animals together as the same species unless the data is fairly robust. I tend towards the lumper side because I feel like it is the more sound scientific approach. We have ridiculously small sample sizes in paleontology and we often don't have enough data to make conclusive statements. That doesn't stop some of my colleagues though.

Brontosaurus is what's called a nomen dubium, literally a bad name. Back in the 1800's, there was a not so friendly competition between a guy at Yale (OC Marsh) and a guy at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (ED Cope.) It got quite personal and ugly. They named a shit ton of dinosaurs from the western US right as railroads were making it feasible for them to be dug up and shipped east en masse. Both guys hired crews to dig, crate and ship the fossils and described everything they could get their hands on to show the other guy up. Because of this, the lax digging methods, and the state of paleontology at the time, lots of things were described on relatively fragmentary material.

Marsh collected an incomplete, juvenile specimen of a sauropod in 1877 and described it based on some of the vertebrae and named it Apatosaurus ajax (Ajax's Deceptive Lizard, after Greater Ajax from the Iliad.) He then collected a much larger, much more complete specimen in 1879. He concluded that it was different from what he'd found before and named a new genus and species Brontosaurus exelcus. The characters he used were mostly based on size and/or individual variation and a paper was written in 1903 by a third paleontologist that concluded there were not enough differences between Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus to consider them separate. Since Apatosaurus is the older name, it has priority and Brontosaurus should have been officially sunk then. Marsh had considerable power with his position at Yale and as director of their museum which had been founded with his families money. He put together a mounted skeleton of his "Brontosaurus" in 1905 for the museum. This was the first mounted sauropod skeleton in the world and received huge publicity. The name stuck on in popular usage after that. The name Brontosaurus was formally sunk again in 1975 when it was shown conclusively to be the same species as Apatosaurus, but the name has still stayed on in popular usage. Most of us should have never even heard the word.

[Rocko20]

The Triceratops is a lie

You take that back right now damnit.

[tx 3 putt]

pods must have read my mind, i was about to type up the same response

[theropods]

The Velociraptor didn't hunt in packs, wasn't that smart, and was basically a fucking chicken.... Fuck you Jurassic Park....

Did the raptors in Jurassic Park III actually exist, and if so when? Also, were they as intelligent as the movie suggests? Were there "raptors"? Yes, there was a group of animals called dromaeosaurs which included animals such as Velociraptor. Velociraptor was actually much smaller than the "velociraptors" in the movie; it was about the size of a medium-sized dog (75 lbs. or so). But there were big dromaeosaurs roughly the size of the movie "raptors."

The dromaeosaurs lived from the Late Jurassic (150 million years ago) to the end of the Cretaceous (65 million years ago). They are thought to be one of the dinosaur groups that is very closely related to birds, because they have long arms and large brains (as well as feathers, we now know) like birds.

We don't really think that dromaeosaurs were "smarter than dolphins, smarter than primates" as a paleontologist in Jurassic Park III claims. They had modestly large brains but those brains were nowhere near as elaborate as the brains of mammals or even most modern birds. If relative brain size is any measure of intelligence, dromaeosaurs were just a little smarter than typical dinosaurs. Not geniuses by mammalian standards...


http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/buzz/popular.html

So Raptor Jesus is a false God....

Velociraptor's intelligence is greatly overstated in Jurassic Park, but they also doubled it's size. The largest known raptor at the time Jurassic Park was made was Deinonychus at about 4.5 feet tall. Velociraptors are ~3feet tall. There is a 6 foot tall raptor that has been found since JP came out called Utahraptor. Reptiles in general aren't winning any IQ contests. They do what they do and they do it pretty well and they don't have to think much. Velociraptors are on the lineage headed to birds and there is a definite enlargement in their brain to body size ratio relative to more "primitive" dinosaurs. We also know now that it would have been covered in a downy fuzz of feathers and had elongate feathers on at least the underside of it's arm, although it obviously isn't using them for flight. This finding is pretty new and the function of these feathers is currently unresolved.

I think the evidence for pack hunting is decent, but it's based on a single site, so it's certainly not 100% conclusive. It would make sense given their size comparative to the prey for some raptors. Deinonychus trying to bring down a Tenontosaurus would be like a wolf trying to bring down a moose alone.

I guess the next thing you'll tell me is that the dinosaur that did in Newman in Jurassic Park 1 is fake, too.

As USAROTC said above, Dilophosaurus was actually pretty badass in life. It was an early form and was 20-25 feet long, a very sizeable dinosaur for the time. The group it belongs to has a badass snaggle tooth between the tooth bearing bones of the upper jaw. No one is sure what it was used for.

[theropods]

Nothing is fucked here. Torosaurus was the one that was sunk, not Triceratops. I agree with this, they lived at the same time, in the same place and are very similar. The null hypothesis should be that they are the same species and we just don't have the data don't seem to support them as separate species, let alone genera. Very closely related, large bodied plant-eaters don't generally coexist with one another. Torosaurus is basically a big Triceratops with a hollow neck frill and some overly developed facial features that could easily be related to growth. They always come out as more closely related to each other than to any other dinosaur, so the reality is that this is only a relatively minor name change and won't really change that much and under no circumstances can Torosaurus be considered the valid name, Triceratops is clearly named first and has an assigned type fossil that predates the discovery of Torosaurus. That makes Torosaurus a junior synonym and thus, the invalid name.

Under the old rules, Tyrannosaurus rex could have been considered an invalid name. A vertebrae that very likely belongs to a T. rex was described a number of years earlier as Manospondylus gigus. Paleontologists really didn't want to sink the name Tyrannosaurus rex though and it was never heavily pursued. In 2000, the international body that governs the naming of animals, the International Conference of Zoological Nomenclature passed a new rule stating that a name that's been considered valid for fifty years can't be replaced by one that's been considered invalid during that timespan. So T. rex's name is safe and was one of the driving forces behind the new rule.

[KaiserSoze]

they live at the same time

ahem...