Iconic doesn’t really mean what you think it means.
On the dinosaur mailing list, the ‘*Torosaurus *being the mature stage of a *Triceratops * and therefore the same species’ hypothesis is more accepted than not. And Triceratops is at least two species.
It also may be that only one sex of *Triceratops *became Torosaurus.
No juvenile *Torosaurus *has ever been found.
If the theory is correct, I think it’s safe to say *Torosaurus *will be subsumed into Triceratops, and not the other way 'round.
All I know is, I once got my ass reamed out for citing Horner as a reference in a GQ thread years ago. Apparently, within the scientific community he is to paleontology as Dr. Phil is to psychiatry (IIRC, that was the comparison made to me at the time).
One of his proteges is the woman who has discovered stuff that really looks like soft tissue inside some fossils. And another of his proteges is the guy coming out with this theory.
He’s probably wrong about T. Rex. So what? Einstein and Hawking have been wrong about stuff too.
One of Horner’s ideas is that some of the sauropods might have had “moose” lips, instead of lizard lips, for grazing. We’ll probably never know, but it would look kinda cool, to see bronto and his buddies smacking down on vegetation.
I didn’t notice this. When were you a docent? Obviously after Sue. That’s wild that the Field Museum says dinosaurs were cold-blooded.
Cross-sections of dinosaur fossil bones look much more like warm-blooded bones than cold-blooded.
And in my mind, this is the most compelling - herbivorous dinosaur fossils are found at about a twenty-to-one ratio to carnivorous dinosaur fossils - consistent with a warm-blooded ecosystem.
Ok, educate me.
I’m just saying that the article’s author never implied that it was the first time anyone had ever heard of triceratops.
You seem to know a lot more about the subject than do I, and probably know more about the species’ appearances in popular culture before and after 1988.
Wasn’t the implication that the T-Rex only saw moving things as potential food? And anything that doesn’t move as inedible? Am I remembering wrong? Did I read too much into that?
I’ve seen this a fair bit in Washington too, though I have also seen plenty of predatory behaviour as well. Really, the two behaviours do not preclude each other. I suspect that the ratio of predation to scavenging varies depending on environmental conditions.
Triceratops was named in 1889, Torosaurus in 1891, which makes Torosaurus the junior synonym. If they are merged, Torosaurus becomes Triceratops.
Wikimedia commons says Torosaurus size is up to 7.5 meters, Triceratops is up to 8-9 meters.
If Triceratops was generally larger (as I have been led to believe and as these cites seem to indicate) how could it have been the juvenile form?
Baby fat?
Well, first, there are relatively few *Torosaurus *fossils. There may be larger ones out there. Secondly, it may well be it’s only one sex of a mature *Triceratops *(about half of young *Triceratops *have thin areas in the skull plate corresponding to where *Torosaurus *has holes). So, it could be the ‘smaller’ sex is the *‘Torosaurus’ *sex.
Yeah Michael Crichton made up a bunch of stuff about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (the whole thing that T-Rex’s see movement, that that one species was poisonous etc.) and used them as examples of things we could never now about Dinos until we had a live one in front of us (the book made it pretty clear these “facts” were his invention with in the story). The movie did away with that subtle distinction.
First of all, bald eagles are scavengers. True fact. You can look it up. They sit around looking for some crows or seagulls to find a dead fish, then they steal it. But all large predators are scavengers, and animals we thought were mostly scavengers (like hyaenas) turn out to do a lot of predation.
Second of all, dinosaurs were warm blooded, for certain values of warm blooded. Of course, in real life all sorts of animals have all sorts of ways to regulate their body temperature, and it doesn’t break down neatly into “warm-blooded vs cold-blooded”. Sheer size is enough to keep most dinosaurs warm all the time. The evidence is pretty compelling. Triceratops is more closely related to a sparrow than it is to a crocodile after all. So it certainly is more correct to say that dinosaurs were warmblooded than to say they were coldblooded, if you don’t have time to get into awhole lecture on exothermy and endothermy and homeothermy and poikilothermy.
But wow, in 2005 you were told to tell people that dinosaurs were cold-blooded? Seriously? Because you should have at least been told to tell people “it’s complicated”.
And yeah, Michael Crichton made up a bunch of stuff about dinosaurs, because it’s a guarantee that if we had living dinosaurs we’d discover all sorts of things that are impossible to discover from fossils. T
That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever read. 
I thought the most recent consensus was that dinos were “lukewarm-blooded”, having some characteristics of modern warm-blooded critters and some of modern cold-blooded. I’d actually be a little stunned if animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago had exactly the same “bloodedness” characteristics of animals today.
Not even creatures that live today have the exact same “bloodednes” characteristics you imagine.
Yes, birds and mammals tend to pump a lot of energy into keeping their bodies warm all the time, while reptiles don’t. But every species is different, and there are mammals like sloths that have very low metabolic rates and body temperatures. But they also live in the tropics, where it’s always warm anyway. And there are warm blooded fish, animals that keep some tissues warm but let other tissues vary in temperature, and on and on.