What bugs me the most is that so many people* who read this incredibly misleading headline immediately proceed to rant about scientists ruining their memories of their favorite dinosaur and/or their theories being garbage, when it’s the JOURNALISTS who are misrepresenting what the scientists are actually saying. :mad
Furthermore, it’s annoying that the public seems to have automatically assumed that, with the release of this scientific statement,
Torosaurus has been definitively rendered obsolete. At this point, IT’S JUST A HYPOTHESIS. There are plenty of ways that it could turn out to not be true. Someone could find a fossil of a young
Torosaurus, or it could be discovered that some “
Triceratops” skulls belonged to older animals than some “
Torosaurus” skulls. Alternatively, new evidence could arise that more or less proves that
Torosaurus is the same as
Triceratops, but for now, the whole idea is mainly just a possibility that has been raised.
*Not GOF members, I mean people in general.
Some guys made a comic that makes fun of this whole thing. And pay close attention to how they're animated...
That
Torosaurus looks a lot like Cera…
I should also mention that DinoGoss is not responsible for any head-desk collision injuries caused by reading the comments in these articles. You've been warned.
See? What'd I tell ya about this being the kind of thing that provokes self-inflicted blows to the heads of scientists?
Are there any skulls displaying various states of development of the frill windows? Does anyone know of another case in nature where solid bones expand to the point of forming windows?
To my knowledge, there are no known
Triceratops skulls that represent an intermediate growth stage between a short, solid, familiar
Triceratops frill and the long
Torosaurus frill with large holes.
Triceratops actually did have windows in the bones of its frill (see the drawing in the upper right-hand corner of the first picture on
this page), but as I understand it, the holes did not go all the way through the frill (Furthermore, they don't look to be in the right place to have later developed into the large windows of
Torosaurus, though I could be wrong). Apparently part of the reasoning for the hypothesis is that a survey of
Triceratops skulls showed that the bone in the area of the frill that corresponded to the location of
Torosaurus's windows showed signs of thinning, which the authors presumed led to the formation of windows. Here's
another page on the subject.
