If Ray Harryhausen was wrong then I don’t want to be right:
Brace yourselves. The famous triceratops dinosaur never actually existed as a separate dinosaur species, paleontologists say.
Known for its three horns and the bony, frilled ridge around its head, the triceratops was most likely just a younger version of the rarer torosaurus, say researchers John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana.
Admittedly, I wouldn’t be able to tell a triceratops from a torosaurus unless they had their names painted on the side, but it’s the principle of the thing. See this picture?
This is what I want. This is what the genetic engineers are tasked with getting for me. If it didn’t really exist, then MAKE it. If they won’t, then what are we paying these guys for, anyway?
Via The Daily Illuminator (the original story is from September, btw).
It’s like when they took away Pluto‘s title of being a planet all over again.
Oh noes! This means Triceratops is now a minor dinosaur! This is getting ridiculous!
But algore said, “the science is settled”.
I remember reading about that a year or so ago. As memory serves, the problem was that some torosaurus fossils were mistakenly identified as triceratops fossile. So this is less like Pluto losing planet status and more like learning that red pomski’s are not actually foxes.
In spite of what the idiot headline says, the very last line of the piece gets it right:
Triceratops fans shouldn’t despair at the finding, though.
Scientists will now reclassify all torosaurus as triceratops.
Triceratops was named two years before Torosaurus was. Under the rules of the game, Triceratops wins.