Credit: Dinosaur images via Wikimedia Commons.
tricerawho.jpg
  • Dinosaur images via Wikimedia Commons.

YOU GUYS. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? First they try to say that it’s not a Brontosaurus, it’s an Apatosaurus. NOW I find out that Triceratops are just juvenile Torosaurs?! Who do you think you are, paleontologists, mucking up my childhood… George Lucas?

Anyway, the scoop comes from rock-star paleontologist Jack Horner and another guy named John Scannella. Here’s what they have to say for themselves:

As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form…

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood.

Whatever.

30 replies on “Paleontologists Join Conspiracy to Destroy My Childhood”

  3. @2 I am so with you. I am not ashamed to say I saw Jurassic Park eleven times in the theater because, well, CGI DINOSAURS!

  5. Triceratops is only my favorite dinosaur. Also, didn’t the Cretaceous period last for, uh, 80 million years? With such a long time-frame for ever-evolving species to be unearthed from, seems like there’s still a good chance that my childhood knowledge will prevail!

  6. Your childhood was all about dogmatic views of an inflexible history that was not subject to change via new discoveries or information?

    That’s sad really.

  7. I remember a similar case. Paleontologists had only found the crania of one genus of homonid, and only the mandible of another…and then someone thought to see if they matched.

    @4: Yes, because Triceratops as a described genus predates Torosaurus.

  8. @2,3, I have a sinking feeling that a CGI dinosaur movie made today would look 10x shittier than the original JP. I don’t know why, but CGI-laden projects just seem to look cheesier and cheesier even as the technology advances. Haven’t seen Avatar, so maybe that was an exception (It ought to have been based on its cost).

  9. On the bright side, since triceratops was named before torosaurus, the name Triceratops stays and now encompasses both!

    So there’s something to be said for etymological seniority, I guess.

  15. If this were true, then wouldn’t there have been torosaurs found alongside triceratops? I scanned the article, but if it mentioned that, then I missed it. Perhaps Torosaurs were just a very rare species?

  18. pretty sure i’m still in the official Jurassic Park fan club (unless it dissolved in the past 2 years) ….still have the ID card in my wallet

  21. I don’t know about “The Worst,” Pete, but it was pretty fucking odious. It’s obvious that he just cranked it out for the paycheck.

  26. Nooo!!!

    My childhood was filled with seeing the original Jurassic Park about 8-10 times in the theater.

    I like that in the first JP movie the designers had to create CGI dinosaurs within real nature. Unlike most of todays computer movies that are all green screen.

  27. @19: WIN.
    @24: Unfunny.
    @25: Apatosaurus (“deceitful lizard”) fits much better; it fooled paleontologists into thinking that it and Brontosaurus were two different genera for quite some time.

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