Dinosaurs are dying out all around us
I was on vacation last month when the news broke that the triceratops had gone extinct. I didn't find out about it for weeks, and I'm still not over the shock.
Continue reading the rest of "Dinosaurs are dying out all around us" by Athens Banner-Herald
The triceratops ("three-horned face") was one of the top five or so dinosaurs whose fossils and drawings we all marveled at as kids. It was a fat lizard with Texas longhorn appendages sticking out of its face and a big bony neck that looked as though it had turned up its collar.
Now, we find that the triceratops never even existed.
Paleontologists at Montana State University reported last month that what we all remember as triceratops was actually just a younger version of another something called torosaurus ("pierced lizard"). A study reporting the ancient news was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, in case you were on vacation, too.
The findings are pretty fundamental, kind of like saying there's no such thing as a 40-year-old teenager. (Well, except in Hollywood.) Like the rest of us, apparently, dinosaurs changed their looks as they aged.
Dinosaurs are dying out faster today than they did 65 million years ago. In the 1970s, many of us were shocked to learn there was no such thing as a brontosaurus.
The brontosaurus ("thunder lizard") lived just long enough to provide Fred Flintstone with bronto burgers before scientists learned it, too, was living under an assumed name.
Because 19th cen
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