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Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Triceratops is Still a Species

In the past few days I've seen some people saying that Triceratops is no longer considered a distinct species, which I thought was rather strange seeing as I had read just an article on NewScientist saying that Torosaurus was simply the adult version of Triceratops. Popular YouTuber sxephil made a video today saying that Triceratops was being amalgamated into Torosaurus, Phil was using Gizmodo as the source for his claim. Gizmodo in turn links to the original article on NewScientist... It seems that whoever wrote the article for Gizmodo didn't have very good reading comprehension because they got it almost completely backwards. Yes, scientists are now saying that Triceratops and Torosaurus are the same species, but it is Torosaurus that is adopting the name Triceratops, not the other way around.

This is simply a case of some idiot 'journalist' not reading something correctly. Your favourite childhood dinosaur still existed.

3 comments:

  1. Brontosaurus? What's the latest with that guy

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  2. That was a totally different issue. That was a mistake regarding different sets of bones being mistakenly classed as belonging to one species. That is why they say that Brontosaurus never existed.

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  3. Or it seems that I'm a douche, and didn't check that information...

    Brontosaurus was a name given to a find that one paleontologist thought was a distinct genus. Others in the field disagreed and it was reassigned by default back to the first species name Which was Apatosaurus.

    Sounds sort of like what I said, but the details were sketchy ;)

    info sourced from here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus

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