There’s a theory out there that the triceratops, the dinosaur we know and love from our childhood, might not be a real species. Jack Horner, the famous and sometimes controversial paleontologist and John Scannella, one of his grad students, have suggested that triceratops is really a juvenile form of torosaurus.
I feel shocked and betrayed. Next, they’re going to tell me that brontosaurus isn’t real, and that Pluto isn’t a planet.
Jack Horner is a dumbass.
At least, that’s what I was taught to say (not quite in those terms) when I was a dinosaur docent at the Field Museum.
Hm, I didn’t see any mention of this the last time I was at the Museum of the Rockies (ceratopsian and tyrannosaur capital of the world, and Horner’s home institute). This must be a new development. Eh, I’ve been looking for an excuse to go over there again, anyway.
I’m pretty sure, though, that torosaurus was named after triceratops was, which would mean that triceratops is not only still real, but it was a lot bigger than previously thought. There’s a life-size torosaurus statue in the middle of the Hall of Horns and Teeth, and man, that thing is huge.
Why is he controversial? Does he come up with wacky theories all the time? Has anything been proven incorrect?
Okay, I am not a paleontologist and I’m not really an expert on this topic at all. I used to be a dinosaur docent at the Field Museum in Chicago, which owns Sue, the world’s largest and most complete T-Rex. We got a lot of questions about two theories that Horner has proposed. One is that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. The other is that T-Rexes were not predators, but scavengers.
Because people asked about these all the time, we (the docents) were prepared with ready-made answers, which were essentially that while these theories have been suggested by some paleontologists (ie, Horner), the Field Museum paleontologists disagreed, and continue to believe that dinosaurs were cold-blooded and that T-Rexes were predators. Then I would bring out my replica of one of Sue’s teeth that I had in my pocket and show them how the serrated edges of the tooth was like a steak knife, perfect for a predator.
Don’t remind me. [[Swigs from a flask, cries self to sleep.]]
Did any smart asses ever point out to you that the serrated edges on that tooth are like the serrated edges on a steak knife, perfect for cutting dead meat? 
I wish I still had my paleontologist roommate. But fromw what I remember, Mr. Horner has his own pet theories, like the tyrannosaurus being a scavenger, and refuses to look at any other data on the subject. He will dig where he doesn’t have permission, and will steal things from other digs.
But, for some reason, he is famous. This really pisses off the paleontologist community, as they feel it makes them all look like that type of jerk. He was so famous he was hired for Jurassic Park to make sure that things were accurate. And while the studio overrode him a lot, he still introduced a bunch of his ideas as if they were mainstream paleontological thought. Like the above mentioned T-rex being a scavenger, yet unable to see anything unless it’s moving)
By the time he gets to JP3, he has apparently already sold out, and tells them that one of the creatures was accurate when it wasn’t. And that’s assuming he wasn’t just stupid enough to think it was actually accurate.
And that franchise has brought in a bunch of students who believe his stuff, and thus his ideas get around peer review, and are much more popular than the data says they should be.
It’s to the point where my paleontologist friend, who was given a copy of Jurassic Park as a gift, now no longer associates with that person. But he keeps the video around just so they will ask him about it, so he can tell them this story. It’s also the only thing he owns that he lets get banged up, keeping it with his excess dirt.
ETA: Still, he tends to exaggerate when he hates something.
Not that I recall!
It’s a pretty deadly looking tooth. I think a scavenger’s tooth would be pretty different, and I probably could have offered more detail back then, but my docent gig finished up in 2005, so I might be fuzzy on the details.
I think that was in the book, right?
People asked us about that a lot too. My stock response was along the lines of, “Rocks don’t move. Do you think T-Rexes would bump into rocks all the time because they couldn’t see them? I don’t know if that would be such a great evolutionary adaptation.”
Am I the only one who’s always kind of skeptical when new dinosaur news comes out? I mean, I’m as big a dinosaur fan as anyone, and more importantly, I’m amazed by the fact that we’ve been able to piece together as much as we have about such alien creatures that lived so long ago. But ultimately, all anyone can do is piece things together and make educated guesses, since all we’ve got are basically a handful of fossilized bones and maybe a couple footprints, from things which for the most part bear no resemblance to anything any human has ever seen.
Anyway, I like triceratops, so I’m just going to ignore this for now. They’re not as cool as the stegosaurus or supersaurus, nor does my fondness for them trump my home-state pride in the goofy-looking hadrosaurus, but triceratops are weird looking and have bone structures which continue to mystify modern science, so they’re pretty high up there on my list of cool dinosaurs.
There is that time he put in his thumb and pulled out a plum.
Oh, I think that the tooth looks amazingly like a predators.
In fact, if you look at T-rex, as a whole, despite his stubby arms, he appears to be very predator-like. An Eagle doesn’t have arms to grasp its prey with, that doesn’t mean it’s a scavenger. Too much about T-Rex screams “I will fucking eat you if I can get my mouth around you,” for it to be a scavenger, imo (the large leg bones, indicating lots of musculature which mean fast, the large jaw, meaning strong chomping, and ridiculous teeth for gnawing you to death). However, your analogy was flawed, you must admit as much.
You compared a tool utilized for cutting dead meat with a tooth (according to the analogy) designed for tearing live flesh. In fact, you wouldn’t use a serrated knife to tear through live flesh – that’s why fillet knives, folding knives (that are meant to be used as weapons), etc, are not serrated.
While serration will do more damage, it also takes significantly more force to work – and this is acceptable with a jaw as large and powerful as a t-rex’s likely was (like a shark, with serrations). However, the comparison is… tortured.
The T-Rex was most certainly a predator. Didn’t anyone notice how it attacked that Ford Explorer, terrorized those kids and ate the poor lawyer in Jurassic Park?
What’s wrong with dinosaurs being warm-blooded? Birds evolved from dinos didn’t they? and they are warm blooded.
Animals don’t turn down a free meal. My WAG would be that they would be like polar bears, a polar bear hunts seals (smaller animals) and savages off of whale carcasses (larger animals) when available. If you picture the huge sizes of some of the dinosaurs, the carcass would last weeks and put up a smell that would travel for miles, when a T-Rex arrived on the scene he would be the most dangerous thing to claim the carcass and would be able to drive off other smaller scavengers looking for a meal.
There are very few larger animals that are strictly predators, and none that I could think of that would pass up a scavenged meal.
As for the eagles in post #13: Down in Washington where I grew up they were mostly predators, hunting lakes for fish. Living in southeast Alaska they are mostly scavengers, hanging out at the dump like seagulls, stealing from your trash, waiting for the salmon to start spawning so they can eat carcasses and eggs. Basically they can wait for the ravens and crows to find something and then use their size to barge in on the free meal.
Next you’re going to be telling me the cake is a lie too.
Shhhh, don’t tell the folks in the other thread. :eek:
Well, couple of things.
Although there are serrations on T. Rex teeth, they are markedly less serrated and less blade-like than the teeth of many other large theropods. Instead, some are D-shaped in cross section and the rest are reinforced by ridges and peg- or spike-like – they are for crushing and holding, not slicing. This doesn’t imply that T. Rex was a scavenger, but it’s part and parcel of the terrific bite force that probably helped the beast bring down mighty prey (and was handy when scavenging or chasing other predators away from kills). Personally I’ve always assumed T. Rex ate anything it felt like eating.
Also, numerous sources have said that the skull of the Triceratops is the largest skull of any land animal. I have a hard time reconciling that with any supposition that it’s a juvenile form of anything. How does Horner explain the skulls shrinking?
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Oh geez. Look at this quote in the article from the OP:
Yeah, 1988 was really the first time anyone heard of them. How self-absorbed is that? That’s like the kid who told me that the band U2 was special because it was the first to use rock and roll as social protest. Yeah, everything that happened when you were a kid is the first and best example of it ever happening. :rolleyes: