Secular Thursday: Triceratops is a big fat liar (but at least he isn’t a mixed swimmer)
I might owe the young earth creationists an apology.
They just may have had it right this whole time with the “fossils are a) tricks from the devil to confuse you or b)a test from God to see if you believe in the Bible” thing, because apparently, there’s no such thing as triceratops. I’m not putting you on! The triceratops may just be the juvenile form of another dinosaur, the lesser known and decidedly less awesome torosaurus. Why was this not readily apparent to scientists and all dino-obsessed 7-year-olds? Because the tricera-toro-liar-saur-tops had mother-freaking shapeshifting bones, y’all. If dinosaurs with Transformer heads isn’t a prank from a devil or some trickster god (Loki, perhaps? Anansi? Coyote, maybe?), I just may be disappointed a second time, because this is the kind of bullhonky nonsense that just makes me think none of us actually have the slightest idea about…well, much of anything,really.
This has been my biggest betrayal by science since they decided that Pluto wasn’t actually a planet. Wasn’t it bad enough to find out that the brontosaurus was just apatosaurus with the wrong head stuck on it? Now it’s bizarro morphosaurs Science is stealing my planets and my dinosaurs, and this is unacceptable! Next they’re going to tell me that you CAN get pregnant from a swimming pool (if so, I’ll have to give more props to the ultrafundies yet again for their sensible “no mixed swimming” policy) or that we really don’t have a clue how electricity or magnets work!
trufax, i was taught dinosaurs did NOT exist growing up. guess where i went to church? haha
Was it a Freewill Baptist Church?
Shape shifting bones sound pretty awesome!
No! Not awesome! Those shifting bones have stolen Triceratops.
You don’t know he wasn’t a mixed swimmer. He might have! That might have been what made his bones shift.
I had JUST gotten over the brontosaurus thing. JUST. When t-rex is just an early form of Sasquatch I am OUTTA HERE.
No. Just . . . no.
This is definitely odd.
On the Pluto thing though I saw a special on the History or Science channel that explained what happened. They discovered another Pluto sized object, then a bunch more and had to slightly redefine what makes a planet. Rather than adding in a bunch more planets they called them all dwarf planets as part of an outer belt of the solar system.
not so fast!
“According to New Scientist, “torosaurus will now be abolished as a species and specimens reassigned to triceratops.” (this should read ‘according to Scanella and Horner 2010′ blah, blah, blah, but I can’t get behind the pay-wall for the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology)
so you (and 7 year olds everywhere) may continue to adore cuddly juvenile triceratops, and merely note that the older triceratops got, the uglier they got, what with the frill fenestration and all.
They’re keeping the name because it’s popular, but since torosaurus is the adult form, we’ll all still know that’s what it the “triceratops” really is.
we’ll have to see how it settles out, but this (from that font of veracity wikipedia) certainly makes it sound as though torosaurus as a name is history. sts.
“This classification found additional support in 2010 from John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman, Montana). After examining 38 skulls from the Hell Creek formation, Scanella and Horner concluded that the mature form of Triceratops did not even have a shortened frill. The specimens long classified as Triceratops, they argued, represented juvenile and young adult individuals while mature individuals had been incorrectly assigned to a separate genus, Torosaurus.[3] It was already known that the frills of Triceratops grew progressively longer as individuals matured; Scanella and Horner said their findings showed that this growth could culminate in the extended, fenestrated frill associated with Torosaurus. With the name Triceratops taking historical priority, they announced that references to the genus Torosaurus would be eliminated from Museum of the Rockies exhibits.
(all annoying emphasis mine
Pluto will always be a planet to me….
LOL. What in the world would we get if a triceratops and an apatosaurus went in for a little mixed swimming on Pluto? Perhaps a little magnetism or electricity.
Thankfully, every day has the potential to bring new discoveries. I wouldn’t have any other way. :-p