We don't need Triceratops. Kosmoceratops with it's 15 horns is five times better anyway.
Posted on 11/09/2010 7:32:29 PM PST by SunkenCiv
I don’t buy it. There are skeletons of juvenile Triceratops. Perhaps Torosaurus is a variation, but I can’t see it as a more mature form of the already huge Triceratops. More likely, this is a case of divergence, as with the Indian and African Elephant.
They do make a good case for the holes in the frill, stating that the bone type for the frill is of a kind that can and does change shape over time, and can both grow and shrink. However, There are far too many examples of both animals to conclusively lump them together.
Granted, I’m not a paleontologist, so I don’t have all the science the way Horner does, but this may be a case of being unable to see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
Yep...thanks for ruining my childhood...freepers...tri-c was my favorite...now what I’m going to tell my 4 year old nephew who loved trc-c too?
Triceratops will still exist. Since the Triceratops name is older than the Torosaurus name, Triceratops is the one that will be used to describe the animal, and the Torosaurus name will be abandoned. The shouting will be over where “Torosaurus” fits into the Triceratops family: as a different stage of maturity, as a variation on the species, as a mutation, or something else.
Interesting that the “adult” Toro is smaller than the young Tri. In checking a reference book I own, “A Guide to Dinosaurs”, Consultant Editor Michael K. Brett-Surman, 2002, I offer more details. Mars, Hatcher and Brown all collected a number of Tri skulls. Eventually 16 species were named. However in recent resarch Dr. Catherine Forster has reduced the number of Tri species to just two—T. Prorsus, and Marsh’s original and larger T. horridus.
Relatively few Toros have been found and while for a time several species were named, the differences have since been attributed to sex variations. The head and frill are larger proportionally than the Tri.
So possibly these specimens were subspecies, or lived in different time periods, or somewhat different ecological conditions. While they are all attributed to the late cretaceous, that was millions of years, and look how much the hominid strain has varied in the past 2 million years.
Torosaurus young afflicted with bonkus of the conkus. It was a deficiency of spinach, rather common in those days.
We don't need Triceratops. Kosmoceratops with it's 15 horns is five times better anyway.
Good thing these creatures don’t do vaginal births.
very good points!
And I'll still kick his butt.
First Pluto, now this. Is nothing sacred?
:’)
:’)
Asimov complained about this regarding Mercury; he wrote one of his whodunits based on the then-wisdom that Mercury always shows one face toward the Sun. Turned out, it doesn’t. :’)
Imagine the hell the dino-era matadors had to endure.
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