Badmovies.org Forum

Smarty-pants scientist are now saying the beloved Triceratops never existed - they were just teen-age Torosaurus.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/triceratops-was-juvenile_n_667475.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/triceratops-was-juvenile_n_667475.html)

But there is hope: According to New Scientist, "torosaurus will now be abolished as a species and specimens reassigned to triceratops."

Whew!

But a blow for fans of the Torosaurus, no doubt. But the classic image of good ol' Triceratop has gone the way of the er.. dinosaurs.

Whew... I still say Brontosaurus.  Screw that Apatosaurus nonsense.   :tongueout: 

No way in hell are you going to get me to start saying Torosaurus instead of Triceratops. 

Brontosaurus does sound cooler, but I did teach my daughter it was an apatosaurus. At least that was actually changed a long time ago, and just took a few decades to reach the public.

As for Triceratops, they made the right decision in realizing that the name was practically a brand. Would have been foolish to change it to the more obscure dinosaur.

It is so weird how much paleontology has changed since I was a kid. I grew up with dinosaurs as big, grey, scaly reptiles that lumbered around dragging their tails on the ground. And you only ever saw maybe a dozen varieties at most in a kid's book. My daughter's dinosaur books have a huge diversity of species, with some of them depicted with bright colours and feathers. And Ro knows them as prehistoric relatives of birds, which has gotten her into at least one argument with an older kid who didn't know as much.

I just can't get over the difference between what we thought a velociraptor looked like less than 20 years ago and the way it's drawn today.
(http://jamieproctor.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/43245373-velociraptors.jpg) (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Velociraptor_BW.jpg)

The field is growing by leaps and bounds. So I can understand that similar dinosaurs might eventually turn out to be the same species. I'm just glad they opted to keep the more famous name of Triceratops.

I think Velociraptor has been known to be different from the Jurassic Park movie for quiet a while, it's just that film series is so popular people have trouble adjusting.

I think people get it confused with Deinonychus.
Here's a Deinonychus skeleton as you can see it looks quite similar to raptors in JP.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ed/FMNH_Deinonychus.JPG/800px-FMNH_Deinonychus.JPG)

The two are very closely related. But I think the confusion in Jurassic Park had more to do with size, since those raptors were much bigger than they should have been. They were the size of Deinonychus (I'm guessing the little guy in your picture might be Velociraptor). But depictions of Deinonychus have changed along with Velociraptor.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Deinonychus_BW-2.png/800px-Deinonychus_BW-2.png)

About renaming Torosaurus Triceratops: they followed the established protocol.  According to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, the Principle of Priority states that the first published name takes precedence.  If the first fossils of this type named were identified as Triceratops, then the second name applied to the same fossils (once it is discovered/decided they are one-and-the-same) gets dropped.  Since triceratops was found and identified a few years before the Torosaurus finds were made, Triceratops takes priority as the name.  The same applied to re-naming Brontosaurus Apatasaurus: Apatasaurus was the name *first* applied to the fossils of that type.  Additional fossils were thought at the time to be a 'different' type and subsequently were named Brontosaurus. When the error was realized, the name first given took priority. So there was no choice involved: it was purely the prescribed procedure. Lucky for us the *first* name turned out to be Triceratops!

I have "Dinosaurs:  The Encyclopedia" by Donald F. Glut, which is a great reference.  Because the theories are changing due to new discoveries, they put out supplements that update the core book every so often.  I think that they are up to #4 or #5.

Funny thing, check out the editor of that tome and the writer/director of "Dinosaur Valley Girls."

Don Glut has had a pretty amazing career.

When just a kid he was published in Famous Monsters of Filmland, and latter wrote episodes for the original Land of the Lost, Transformers, Ducktales, and many, many other classic animated series.

He's still a regular poster at the Classic Horror Film Board. He's a really nice fellow and around that board he's just 'one of the guys'.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0323304/ (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0323304/)

I wonder what would have happened if that hadn't been the case. Would there have been a push to make an exception or change the protocol? Brontosaurus was eliminated over a century ago, when science was the only concern. Even so, the name stuck in popular culture until about the 90s. Dinosaurs are big business today. They bring people into museums, sell merchandise and can be credited with getting a lot of kids interested in science. Triceratops is an easily recognizable dinosaur and a favourite of kids. There would be purists who would argue that it shouldn't matter, but I'm not so sure Triceratops would have given up its name if it hadn't been named first.

More than likely the 'official' name still would have been changed and the name commonly in use would have been Triceratops.  Look at Apatasaurus: how often do you still hear 'Brontosaurus'?  Thanks to its familiarity (wide-spread due to popular culture sources such as The Flintstones) Brontosaurus is still used quite often indeed - in non-scientific speech.  It would end up being just one more opportunity for kids to know more about the subject than their elders do - and to correct them with a mini-lecture.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Barneylogo.png)

There were two names for a particular duck-billed dinosaur.  Anatosaurus and Trachodon.  Anatosaurus is the proper naemed but I still use Tracodon.  Because it sounds cooler. 

Triceratops is one of my favorite dinosurs, so I'm glad it's name is the one sticking around.

Well, they're somewhere inbetween the Deiny (160 pounds) and the utahraptor (1100 pounds).  Either way, current train of thought is the entire family had feathers.  They look silly to me with feathers, I have to admit.

There are quite a few dinosaur species that they're starting to suspect are just juvenile forms of other dinosaurs. It makes sense since all we have to go off of are bones and a rare few other fossilized tissues (anyone else think it's really cool that they actually found a mummified dinosaur?). Think about it: if someone a million years ago found the fossils of tadpoles and frogs they'd probably assume that they were two completely different species.

I remember reading they made the raptors in Jurassic Park big in the name of artistic liscence.  Then after they had made the film a  larger raptor was found in China.  But I can't recall the citation, sorry!
-Ed