Triceratops

Today I read that some paleontologists in Montana are saying that the Triceratops might not have ever existed.

I need to vent a little on this.

I mean, when I was a kid I loved The Land Before Time, and while the "3 horns" were never as courageous or as kind as the more noble "long necks," they were contributed to the community..and I'd be lying if I said that Sarah never helped Littlefoot out of a scrape.

As a kid I'd spend hours pouring over dinosaur books...trying to figure out who would beat up whom. At the top of my list of pre-historic tough guys was the triceratops. I figured that the triceratops, along with the Tyrannosaurus, were the top dogs of the Jurassic world. I liked T-Rex way more than the triceratops, but I figured with Rex's puny arms and Trike's defensible armor made them a pretty fair match up.

(My plastic dinosaur toys re-enacted this battle many times. According to my scientific battle re-creations, in ancient times the T-Rex usually won the fight by picking the Triceratops up in its jaws and then throwing the Triceratops out of the planter and onto the sidewalk).

Anyway, all I'm saying is that this animal captured my imagination (and I'm sure the imagination of a whole bunch of other kids).

So the question is who do these childhood attacking scientists think they are? What gives them the right to take the triceratops away?

It feels sorta like a betrayal when they try to.

I mean, well, look at it this way. Dinosaurs are fascinating to a kid because they're like science-based dragons. When you're a kid anything big and tough and monstrous (as long as it's not hiding in your closet when you sleep) is awesome. And while it's fun to imagine a dragon, you always know in the back of your painfully pragmatic childhood brain that dragons don't really exist outside of stories.

...But Dinosaurs? Scientists in respectable lab coats tell us all about them. They tell us how big they are, what they would eat, and they give us bones to look at and point to so we can say "See! That existed. That's a fairy tale monster with scientific support!"

Anyway, given that dinosaurs are basically fairy tales that we were told we could believe in, and given that they keep telling us that some dinosaurs never existed....it's sort of destroying one of the things that make dinosaurs so fascinating...that they're something we can believe in.

Dinosaurs are amazing to kids because they're horrific and real.

When you're a kid and you're told that a dinosaur that was accepted as fact never existed, it puts a hole in the imagination. That hole creates a vacuum of cynicism that sucks the rest of the dinosaurs down the ontological toilet.

You can't say "Dinosaurs are real, oh, except that one we told you about... our bad. So, all those daydreams about that dinosaur...yeah, might as well have been about a unicorn."

Also, to make matters worse, we're being told the awful truth about the Triceratops right on the heels of losing Pluto as a planet....this is just too much.

Is there some sort of trend now to take away beloved childhood science? It's like scientists in the exploratory disciplines like astronomy and paleontology can't find anything groundbreaking and new so they're trying to create excitement by attacking iconic things with redefinition.

Well, I say let's get ahead of the game and beat them to it.

Did you know that the big red "eye" of Jupiter really isn't a storm?

Yup, it's just a huge crater because, unlike Earth, Jupiter doesn't have a crack team of oil drillers in space suits lead by Bruce Willis to protect it from rogue meteors.

The pterodactyl? Yeah, it couldn't fly. Take all those daydreams as a kid of soaring through the air held up by the leathery wings of a huge dinosaur and toss them out the window...cause the pterodactyl's wings were used for swimming.

In fact, lets just throw dinosaurs out entirely. The bones we find were actually buried by angels to test the faith of biblcal literalists.

Now that I'm re-reading what I just wrote it's beginning to seem like a rant, so I'm gonna go back to the Triceratops now.

So, here's my problem with these wacky childhood attacking scientists, and their new position on the Triceratops...

What they're saying if I remember right is that the Triceratops is actually the Torosaurus. Supposedly, the Triceratops as we know it is just a Torosaurus in the early stages of development.

But here's the problem I have with that: even as I type Torosaurus my spell check is trying to tell me that Torosaurus isn't a word....this is cause everyone knows about the Triceratops but no one knows about the Torosaurus.

So, why do we have to lose the Triceratops? If there really is only one dinosaur being referred to twice, why are we losing the iconic dinosaur? If the Triceratops is nothing but a nascent Torosaurus, can't we just make the Torosaurus an aged Triceratops?

That compromise could have been made just as easily...only problem is no one knows what the heck a Torosaurus is so no one would care to lose it and the scientists that decided to attack our childhood wouldn't get research money for destroying a dinosaur no one cared about.

So I guess what I'm saying is this is how the conversation should go if someone wants to discuss the loss of a dinosaur:

"Did you know the Torosaurs never existed?"

"I've heard that "

"Yeah, scientists just discovered that it's just a geriatric Triceratops."

"Awesome. Never heard about a Torosaurs before, but I like the Triceratops so it must be cool too."

See? No waves. No controversy...just enlightenment.

We need to fight these scientists. They're the real ones that killed the dinosaurs.

If we don't let them get away with this nonsense we can get them out into the plains of Montana making real discoveries. They could find something like Superomegasaurus--a dinosaur that eats rocks and breathes fire. That would be a discovery that I'd be happy to read about. Yeah, do that...and leave Sarah and Littlefoot alone.

As far as I'm concerned The Land Before Time is an historical document.

Well, that's about all I feel like ranting on today.

In other news today is my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!

Also, a cool word is brobdingnagian. It means enormous and huge.

Here's a sample sentence: The Triceratops was a brobdingnagian beast.

Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful day.