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2012 (the movie but also the year) is rapidly approaching, and with it comes the first of the doomsday predictions: It’s possible that one-third of all named dinosaur species never existed. Okay, so it’s a retroactive prophecy (and also a “wild guess”), but still kinda spooky.
UC Berkeley paleontologists, with all their badass technology and intelligence, recently published a paper that retroactively “wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur.”
Before you get excited, there were no time-travel paradoxes involved. Essentially this was just correcting a past mistake. Paleontologists now believe that several of the fossils they thought were new species of dinosaurs were actually different stages of development of the same dinosaur. According to the article,
The confusion is traced to their bizarre head ornaments, ranging from shields and domes to horns and spikes, which changed dramatically with age and sexual maturity, making the heads of youngsters look very different from those of adults.
An easy mistake, in our book. After all, it’s the same with humans, really. It’s hard to predict that an adolescent hipster with a mohawk and a spike collar will evolve into a middle-aged man with a briefcase and a combover. We could forgive an outside observer for assuming that they were entirely different species.
Image source: hoyasmeg under Creative Commons
New analyses of dinosaur growth may wipe out one-third of species [UC Berkeley News]
Tags:dinosaurs, juvenile, maturity, new research, paleontology
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