Okay, so now scientists are coming out and saying that the Triceratops never existed?! What?! Are you kidding me? You just took the small 10-year-old boy still alive inside and crushed one of his dreams! What is wrong with you snotty, dusty, crusty, stuck-up scientists? Huh?!
Oh, wait, slight overreaction, is there a silver lining to all this uproar perhaps?
Basically, the story is: Paleontologists have come out to say that the Triceratops, one of the most well know, commercialized dinosaurs we have, is in fact, been misidentified. It is not in fact its own species, but simply a stage of maturity or a growth stage of the Torosaurus. Now if you’re like me, and you read Torosaurus, you’re reaction is THE WHAT-A-SAURUS?!
So, scientists are saying that as the Triceratops grew and aged, its skull did in fact move and change shape as it matured into what has been identified as the Torosaurus. “Even in the most mature specimens that we’ve examined, there is evidence that the skull was still undergoing dramatic changes at the time of death,” one of the researchers says. In fact, if you look at pictures, short of slight changes in the shape of the frill on the back of the head, there aren’t that many distinctions.
So what does all this mean? That’s the funny part, with all the hoopla and uproar this has brought about online, at the end of the day, nothing changes for that child in our heart because the Triceratops isn’t going anywhere! In fact, all this means is that Torosaurus and Triceratops will be reclassified into one single species, and based on standards out there in the scientific world, Triceratops will be the name to identify the species, not Torosaurus. So the dino no one really knew about, will fade and become famous and infamous with the three-horned dino everyone loves, the Triceratops!