Cambrian Magazine by Courtney Elizabeth

Myths and Misconceptions | Masthead

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief Courtney Gauthier Design Director Yvette Perullo Executive Editor Jillian Coehlo Senior Digital Editor Vinny Tran Senior Editor Charlotte Rose Copy Editor Dallas Cunha Research + Arts Editor Poppy the Rat Associate Research Editor Kelly Costa

DESIGN & PHOTOGRAPHY Photo Editor Kenny Truong Art Director Patricia Gauthier

CREATIVE SERVICES Cambrian is for both the dinosaur enthusiast and professional. It works to give the latest news in paleontology in an easy to digest way, while not sacrificing quality and detail. With a mix of scientific articles, illustrations, and fun facts; we aim to get more people interested in the fascinating world of paleontology. It’s not just looking at fossils, it includes millions and millions of years of life waiting to be discovered. We hope to present the information in a fresh, clean way, making the content and aesthetic equally as important. We aren’t just another science magazine, we are Cambrian.

Editorial Director Kayla Rich Creative Director Oreo Smoreo Managing Editor Karen Chen Assistant Content Saul Baizman Cambrian Magazine 600 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 Phone: 508-262-9700 Fax: 508-262-4925 Editorial fax: 508-267-1774 Portfolio Massachusetts College of Art and Design Spring 2020

- Courtney Gauthier, Editor in Chief

CAMBRIAN | issue #12

Contents 04

Everything You Know About Velociraptors is a Lie

It’s no surprise that one of the most popular dinosaurs in the world is the Velociraptor. Their rise in popularity was heavily influenced by the way that they were portrayed in the ‘Jurassic Park’ films. While there may be some things about them that the films got right, there are some serious errors in their on screen depictions.

What Makes A Dinosaur A Dinosaur? The question may sound like a “duh,” but it gets to the heart of how we categorize and define nature.

Horns, Frills, and Gaps An Interview With Paleontologist Peter Dodson

Myths and Misconceptions | Table of Contents

Paleontology vs. Archaeology

Both archaeologists and paleontologists spend their days dissecting how life was way back when; the distinction between them lies in the details of what they study.

The Fossils of Mythical Beasts

Imagine the world without any knowledge of the planet’s ancient past or the idea that extinct species once roamed the world. Now, imagine you came across the fossilized remains of a dinosaur or other ancient creature, what would you make of them?

Girls Rock!

The hurdles that prevent female fossil hunters from rising at the same rates as their male peers are myriad—but they are all interconnected

Dinosaurs are ancient organisms, and thus their study falls into the category of paleontology. But there are lots of other fossil organisms as well. Everything from sponges, to corals, to snakes.

The media love the phrase missing link—news stories have used it to describe no fewer than 28 paleontological discoveries in the past decade.

The Study of Dinosaurs

The “Missing Link”

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EVERYTHIN

YOU KNOW ABOUT

VELOCIRAPTOR IS A

LIE By Daven Hiskey

Myths and Misconceptions | Feature 1

RS Today I found out everything you probably think you know about Velociraptors is a lie. Now to be fair, everything I “knew” about Velociraptors came from the Jurassic Park movies and so I shouldn’t really be surprised it was all wrong. So if, like me, you thought that Velociraptors were slightly bigger than a human; reptilian looking; hunted in packs; were found in what is now the United States; and were ridiculously intelligent. Well, literally none of that is true.

everything I knew... came from the Jurassic Park movies 05

Myths and Misconceptions | Feature 1

Velociraptors were actually only about the size of a domesticated Turkey, being only about 3 feet tall and 6 feet long, with most of the length coming from the tail and weighing in at around 20-30 pounds full grown. More than that, they also looked somewhat like a Turkey as well, but with a long tail obviously. It turns out, Velociraptors were very similar to birds in a lot of ways. They had hollow bones, feathers, built nests for their eggs, and are thought to have behaved very similar to birds. As Mark Norell, curator of fossil reptiles, amphibians, and birds at the American Museum of Natural History, stated, “The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor. Both have wishbones; brooded their nests; possess hollow bones; and were covered in feathers. If animals like Velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” More than that, there has never been one bit of evidence that suggested that

Mounted V. mongoliensis cast at Wyoming Dinosaur Center

left: Size comparison of a potato, Utahraptor claw, and a Velociraptor claw

Velociraptors hunted in packs. In fact, every fossil found of Velociraptors has seemed to indicate they were solitary creatures. There was even one fossil where the Velociraptor was in the act of trying to kill a Protoceratops, which was a pig sized dinosaur, when a sandstorm came up and buried them both while they were still fighting one another. If they hunted in packs, there should have been more Velociraptors at that find, particularly given the size of the Protoceratops relative to the Velociraptor. Next up, the Velociraptors were not found in the United States, as the films suggested: where the paleontologists in the film dug up the Velociraptor skeleton in Montana. In fact, they have only been found in Central Asia around Mongolia. Were they intelligent? Well, for a dinosaur, it is thought they were somewhat intelligent due to their brain size relative to body size. But it turns out, that’s basically just saying they were slightly more intelligent than a board with a nail in it. For reference, the dinosaur that is thought to have been the smartest of all dinosaurs was the Troodon; it is thought to

The Deinonychus dy · non · i · khus Deinonychus, (genus Deinonychus), longclawed carnivorous dinosaurs that flourished in western North America during the Early Cretaceous Period (145.5 million to 99.6 million years ago). A member of the dromaeosaur group, Deinonychus was bipedal, walking on two legs, as did all theropod dinosaurs. Its principal killing devices were large sicklelike talons 13 cm (5 inches) long on the second toe of each foot. The slender, outstretched tail was enclosed in bundles of bony rods. These extensions of the tail vertebrae were ideal for helping the animal maintain balance as it ran or attacked prey. Deinonychus was the model for the “raptor” dinosaurs of the motion picture Jurassic Park (1993). The name raptor has come to apply to dromaeosaurs in general as a contraction for Velociraptor, a genus of dromaeosaur that was considerably smaller than Deinonychus. However, the term raptor (from the Greek word for “seize” or “grab”) is more correctly applied to birds such as hawks and eagles, which grasp prey with their talons. Deinonynchus measured about 2.5 metres (8 feet) or perhaps more in length and weighed 45–68 kg (100–150 pounds). It was evidently a fast, agile predator whose large brain enabled it to perform relatively complex movements during the chase and kill.

have been around as smart as a primitive opossum. So there goes the whole Philosraptor thing out the window. The deepest thoughts a Velociraptor ever thought were probably on the level of the Seagulls in Finding Nemo. “Mine?” Hardly the “smarter than dolphins, whales, and some primates” that Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III suggests. Actually, if you’ve ever raised domestic Turkey’s, which I have and don’t recommend, the “just slightly more intelligent than a board with a nail in it”, is about the domestic Turkey’s level of intelligence too. I’m beginning to think Velociraptors were nothing but domestic Turkeys with slightly different bone structure. So what were they thinking in Jurassic Park? Well basically, they modeled what they called the “Velociraptor” in the movie after the Deinonychus. The Deinonychus were also raptors, but were significantly bigger than the Velociraptors, coming in at about 12 feet long, about 6 feet tall, and weighing about 150 pounds full grown. Pretty much picture the “Velociraptor” in Jurassic Park and you get a pretty good idea of what the Deinonychus were thought to have looked like (although there still is some debate over whether they too had feathers, with many researchers leaning that way; so really, picture the “Velociraptor” in Jurassic Park and add feathers and you get the Deinonychus). The Deinonychus also were thought to have occasionally hunted in packs to bring down larger prey and were thought to have been very fast. Their habitat was in the forests of North America. Now on the intelligence bit, they too weren’t really thought to have been very intelligent. Although, clearly they were at least smart enough to work together to bring down larger prey when the need arose.

...there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors...

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What Makes A

DINOSAUR A DINOSAUR? By Riley Black

Ask any 8-year-old what a dinosaur is, and she’ll eagerly rattle off her favorite of the prehistoric celebrities. And by the time we’re adults, dinosaurs feel utterly familiar; they’re the rockstars of prehistory, more famous and enduring then any Hollywood A-lister. They loom large in our imagination as big, toothy, and, above all, bizarre animals that have been carving out a life for themselves on Earth for the past 235 million years. But what is a dinosaur, really? To answer that, we need to go back in time (no, not that far). Long before scientists were called scientists, people all over the

world had been wondering who left all those ancient bones and footprints. At Flag Point in southern Utah, for example, Native Americans chiseled pictographs of three-toed footprints, inspired by dinosaur tracks in the surrounding Jurassic rock. And even by the time the naturalist William Buckland christened Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be named, in 1824, early geologists were in the dark as to what these animals were like. Megalosaurus and other early finds like Iguanodon were envisioned as basically crocodiles and iguanas longer than a city bus.

Myths and Misconceptions | Feature 2

Sir Richard Owen, the first to recognize a difference between dinosaurs and today’s lizards

Enter British paleontologist and biologist Richard Owen, a superstar of 19th century anatomy famous for his cantankerous attitude. As he kept an eye on what his contemporaries were discovering, Owen noticed something strange about some of the petrified reptiles coming out of Europe’s ancient rock. “Many new fossil reptiles had been found in the early 19th century,” Smithsonian’s Curator of Dinosauria Matthew Carrano says, “but it wasn’t clear what they were, or whether they were all related to one another.” Owen set about trying to pinpoint that mysterious relationship. Owen concluded that Megalosaurus, Iguanodon and a third species called

Hylaeosaurus were all united by skeletal similarities in the hip to the exclusion of other saurians of the same time. These features, including five fused vertebrae at a part of the hip called the sacrum, are “peculiar among Reptiles,” Owen wrote in his 1842 report. He argued that this was “sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria”—the terrible lizards. Since then, discoveries from every continent have filled museums with an increasing number of ever-more-unusual dinosaurs. Yet the more paleontologists find, the stranger and more wonderful these terrible lizards become—and the harder it is to define what makes a dinosaur, a dinosaur. First of all, dinosaurs are wonderfully diverse. Paleontologists have recognized

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over 1,000 distinct non-avian species, from tiny, feathery insect hunters to giants that grew to be over 100 feet long and weigh over 70 tons. There were horned dinosaurs, armored dinosaurs, dome-headed dinosaurs, crested dinosaurs, long-necked dinosaurs, sickle-clawed dinosaurs and flesh-ripping dinosaurs. Most lived an entirely terrestrial existence, but some frequently waded into lakes and rivers (recently scientists were flabbergasted by the first known amphibious dinosaur, a swan-like swimmer not dissimilar from a velociraptor). And one lineage flapped and fluttered its way into the air, evolving into the birds that are the only dinosaurs alive today. These vastly different animals share some key traits: They all laid and hatch from eggs, for example, and all the toothed

dinosaurs constantly replaced their dental toolkit throughout their lives. But if we really want to get a handle on what makes a dinosaur a dinosaur, we need to zoom out. Picking dinosaurs out the reptile family tree—from mighty Tyrannosaurus to a bee hummingbird—requires an evolutionary perspective. Hans-Dieter Sues, the Smithsonian Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, puts it like this. Dinosauria is a group that contains the most recent common ancestor of birds—like a pigeon walking by on the sidewalk—and the non-avian dinosaur Triceratops, Sues says, including all the descendants of that common ancestor. There are some tell-tale characteristics of the hind limbs that allow experts to separate dinosaurs from non-dinosaurs going

A view of the Dinosaur Hall in the National Museum of Natural History in 2003 shows a Triceratops at front left and a Tyrannosaurus Rex at right front; Diplodocus longus is at center.

Myths and Misconceptions | Feature 2

all the way back to the earliest species, Sues says, but the big picture view is that if you take Triceratops in one hand and a pigeon in the other and follow those two back to their last common ancestor, every animal that falls within that group counts as a dinosaur and shares certain traits in common. The two concepts are combined, Carrano says, “dinosaurs are linked by common ancestry, which has given them through inheritance a set of unique features.” “Dinosaur”, then, isn’t just a popular term for anything scaly and extinct. It’s a scientific term with a strict meaning with a defined membership. Sometimes this creates what might feel like a paradox between the ancient and modern. All birds are dinosaurs, for example, but not all dinosaurs are birds. Given that birds are the only dinosaurs that remain, experts often specify whether they’re talking about non-avian or avian dinosaurs. All the same, a penguin is just as much a terrible lizard as Stegosaurus. Pop culture, as you’ve probably noticed, doesn’t always play by the rules. In sets of plastic toys, paleo-centric TV shows like DinoRiders, and even the Jurassic Park movies, dinosaurs and non-dinosaurs are often indiscriminately intermingled without much thought to the fact that the word dinosaur doesn’t apply to just anything. The idea that the word dinosaur refers to any suitably reptilian creature, Sues says, “is due to countless children’s books and commercial products that treat any large or bizarre extinct animal as a ‘dinosaur.’” So how can you, as an armchair or an aspiring paleontologist, know whether that so-called ’saur on the silver screen is a real dino or a wannabe? Fortunately, there are a few giveaways. “A lot of features that unite dinosaurs involve the construction of the hip and thigh regions,” says Smithsonian Peter Buck fellow Adam Pritchard, which gave dinosaurs their upright, pillar-legged posture. “Look at the top of the thigh bone,” or the upper leg in digitally revived

Dinosaur, isn’t just a popular term for anything scaly and extinct. dinosaurs of the movies, Pritchard suggests,” and see if it turns inwards to fit inside the socket of the hip.” Another challenge for the public in deciphering dinos is that geologic time can be hard to squeeze into our heads. “I think it’s quite common in popular thinking to imagine the past as having happened more or less all at once,” Carrano says, which means the further back in time we try to think the more lines get blurred. This means that non-dinosaurs have often been falsely grouped in with the likes of Stegosaurus, even though they lived millions of years apart. The sail-backed Dimetrodon? That’s a protomammal more closely related to us than dinosaurs. The fish-like ichthyosaurs that swam through the seas? They were one of many reptile lineages that adapted to life in the water during the Mesozoic. And the leathery-winged pterosaurs of the air? Despite being featured in the past three Jurassic Park films, they were cousins of dinosaurs that split off from an earlier ancestor. Dinosaurs are their own discrete group, in other words, joined to all the rest of their family through their common ancestry and identified through the traits of their hips that have been maintained from the Triassic to the present. It might be difficult to think of an emu or quail as a terrible lizard, but you’ll have to take that argument up with the ghost of Richard Owen. Of course, talking about dinosaurs this way is about as exact as discussing mammals. Mammals—which are typically defined by their 13

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tendency to grow fur, give birth to live young and make milk—include everything from humans to hyenas, from shrews to sea whales. Mammals are composed of many branches that have moved around throughout the years, and the same was true for dinosaurs. Paleontologists have spent decades arranging and rearranging these branches, and a study earlier this year reinvigorated a debate over the shape of the dinosaur family tree. “The classification of dinosaurs has undergone countless changes over the years,” Sues says, with the roots of the latest exchange going back to the 19th century. In 1888 the British paleontologist Harry Govier Seeley argued that Owen’s Dinosauria didn’t make up a natural group, but instead was a mash of what he saw as two very different groups of ancient reptiles. Seeley instead separated these two groups on the basis of their hip shape. There was the Saurischia, which he defined by its roughly lizard-like kind

From top to bottom: A Dimetrodon fossil; an Ichthyosaur fossil; a Rhamphorhynchus fossil, a species of pterosaur.

The Dinosauria contains two major groups of dinosaurs: the Ornithischia, or “birdhipped” dinosaurs, and the Saurischia, or “lizard-hipped” dinosaurs.

of hip, and included the sauropod and theropod dinosaurs. And then there were the Ornithischia, which had a more birdlike kind of hip, and comprised armored dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs, duckbill dinosaurs and their relatives. (The irony being that we now know “bird-hipped” dinosaurs are not closely related to birds at all. Birds are technically saurischian dinosaurs with highly-modified hips.) Paleontologists ultimately combined Owen’s and Seeley’s ideas. Today it’s believed that Dinosauria is a real group, anchored through shared traits to common ancestry to the exclusion of other animals. But the saurischians and ornithischians are the two main branches with more specific lineages arrayed along them. Other ideas came and went, but this vision of the dinosaur family tree stayed stable. Then, early in 2017, a study by paleontologist Matthew Baron and colleagues shook things up. Instead of finding the traditional arrangement, the new analysis by Baron

Myths and Misconceptions | Feature 2

Simplified versions of the dinosaur family tree, showing the major changes proposed in this study

and colleagues came up with something different. Dinosaurs remained as a natural group, but theropod dinosaurs came out as close relatives of ornithischians—normally positioned on the other side of the family tree—and sauropod dinosaurs showed up as relatives of an enigmatic group of early carnivorous dinosaurs called herrerasaurids. The researchers decided to call the theropod-ornithischian group Ornithoscelida (a term coined by 19th century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley) and kept Saurischia for the other group. But a single new paper doesn’t make a consensus. Months later, a different group of paleontologists upheld the traditional arrangement in a rebuttal, to which followed a rebuttal to the rebuttal. For the moment, Sues says, “most dinosaur experts are not swayed by the

novel hypothesis, but it does serve a useful purpose because it will stimulate more in-depth analysis, especially of early dinosaurs.” If all this systematic shuffling has left you in a tizzy, don’t fret. A new fossil or analysis can sow more confusion that understanding upon announcement, says Pritchard. But that’s no reason to despair. This is just how science works: Just as dinosaurs evolved and changed, so does the science, to incorporate new evidence and theories. Relationships are not ‘established’ but must always remain hypotheses,” Sues says, which “stand or fall as evidence is accrued.” “That seems to be normal for nature,” Pritchard adds. “It is always much more complicated and unexpected than what scientists predict.”

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THE AGE OF THE

DINOSAURS MESOZOIC ERA: 252 - 65 MILLION YEARS AGO FIRST MODERN CORALS

FIRST MARINE REPTILES

EARLY MAMMALS

SMALL DINOSAURS

250 MYA

JURASSIC

2 1

CONIFER FORESTS

200 MYA

TRIASSIC 1. Eudimorphodon 2. Peteinosaurus 3. Postosuchus 4. Cynognathus 5. Daemonosaurus 10 6. Placerias 7. Coelophysis 8. Plateosaurus 9. Pisanosaurus 10. Rhynchosaurus

PANGEA BEGINS TO SPLIT

5 6 7

8 9

1. Pterodactylus 2. Wiehenvenator 3. Archeopteryx 4. Plesiosaurus 5. Megalosaurus 6. Allosaurus 7. Compsognathus 8. Diplodocus 9. Ichtyosaurus 10. Brachiosaurus 11. Liopleurodon 12. Dilophosaurus 13. Stegosaurus

Myths and Misconceptions | Infographic

The earliest known dinosaur appeared about 245 million years ago during the Late Triassic Period (250 to 210 million years ago). Dinosaurs evolved into a very diverse group of animals with a vast array of physical features, including modern birds. Contrary to what many people think, not all dinosaurs lived during the same geological period. Stegosaurus, for example, lived during the Late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago. Tyrannosaurus rex lived during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 72 million years ago.

Stegosaurus was extinct for 66 million years before Tyrannosaurus walked on Earth. During the Mesozoic Era (a period of more than 180 million years that included the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods), a species of non-avian dinosaur evolved into a species of avian dinosaur. This avian dinosaur is the first bird and the forerunner of all birds. Every non-avian dinosaur went extinct 66 million years ago. There are several theories as to what may have contributed to the mass extinction of non-avian

dinosaurs and other species at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It is certain that a massive asteroid or comet struck Earth during this time, causing a dramatic shift in Earth’s climate. Some scientists speculate that this impact had catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. But other factors, including changing sea levels and large-scale volcanic activity, may also have played a significant role in this mass extinction.

MYA - Million years ago

LARGE DINOSAURS

FIRST BIRDS

FIRST FLOWERING PLANTS

BIRDS DIVERSIFY

MODERN SHARKS & RAYS

145 MYA

CRETACEOUS

65 MYA

4 1. Quetzalcoatlus 2. Pterandon 3. Ornithocheirus 4. Polacanthus 5. Oviraptor 6. Velociraptor 7. Triceratops 8. Tyrannosaurus 9. Parasaurolophus 10. Utahraptor 11. Spinosaurus 12. Iguanodon

5 9

9 8 6 12

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HORNS, FRILLS, AND GAPS

An Interview With Paleontologist Peter Dodson

Myths and Misconceptions | Interview

What kicked off your interest in paleontology and horned dinosaurs in particular?

Dr. Peter Dodson is a paleontologist and writer based at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of paleontology and anatomy. Since the 1970s, he has excavated dinosaurs and other extinct animals around the world — from Alberta and China to Argentina and Egypt — and has described and co-described multiple new animals, including Avaceratops (1986) and Paralititan (2001). Along with David Weishampel and Halszka Osmolska, Dodson co-edited and contributed to both editions of The Dinosauria (1990 and 2004), and is currently working on the second edition of his 1996 book The Horned Dinosaurs.

Paleontology is just something that gripped me as a kid. I saw Fantasia and the march of extinction set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was terribly gripping. I lived in Indiana and very oddly, the mummies at the Field Museum [in Chicago] grabbed me more than the dinosaurs at the time. But when I was eleven, I told my parents I wanted to be a paleontologist, and amazingly, it happened! There wasn’t nearly as much stuff around to distract me. Horned dinosaurs were always serendipitous. As a grad student at Yale, I did a study comparing the growth series of alligators, lizards, Protoceratops, and lambeosaurine hadrosaurs, and in 1981, I saw what would be known as Avaceratops among a collection of hadrosaur fossils from Montana. I recognized the animal might be new, and with the help of the Delaware Valley Paleontological Society, we raised $5,000 to obtain the Avaceratops for the Academy of Natural Sciences by selling dinosaur cookies. The Academy at the time had no dinosaur exhibit other than the Corythosaurus skeleton and the Torosaurus skull and they were surprised by the public interest. So they eventually opened a new dinosaur hall in 1986 — the same year I got to name Avaceratops. That led to the Dinosauria (1990) where I got to write the chapter on ceratopsians with Phil Currie, and The Horned Dinosaurs (1996).

Dinosaur Hall at The Academy of Natural Sciences

I met with him recently to learn more about how and when he entered paleontology, what we do (and don’t) know about ceratopsian dinosaurs, and where he’d like to dig next.

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Different types of ceratopsians as illustrated by Julius Csotonyi

What’s been the biggest surprise in your career as a paleontologist? How many kinds of dinosaurs there are. When you ask people their favorite dinosaurs, they say Triceratops, T. rex, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, all of which were named between 1870 and 1910. Not only are they continuing to be described, but they’re being described at an accelerating rate. Only three new kinds of dinosaurs were described in the 1960s. By 1990, it was six per year; by 2006, it was twenty per year; it’s currently forty per year. How have advances in technology directly affected your work?

When I was a grad student, we analyzed datasets using computer punch cards. We would slip them into a mainframe computer, which would produce its own results an hour later. The Internet didn’t come along till the nineties and I didn’t get a personal computer till 1998, so communication has been easier since then. 3-D scanners have been particularly valuable lately because I can’t take fossils of Psittacosaurus home from China.

A dinosaur fossil in the process of being scanned for 3d printing

Myths and Misconceptions | Interview

Are there any common misconceptions that people have about horned dinosaurs that you feel need to be corrected? One of the ideas that has been laid to rest is that they used the frills to anchor their jaw muscles. If they engaged in combat with their horns, they would lacerate those muscles. We now think the frills were used for ritualized display or in a breeding context rather than a combat context. One concept I’d like to address is that Triceratops was just food for T. rex. An adult bull Triceratops would have been a very powerful and dangerous animal that a T. rex would be unlikely to tackle that often.I did a study about sexual dimorphism in Protoceratops that for many years was accepted for many years but is now roundly rejected. It was always controversial but it’s also hard to replicate or confirm because the beautiful skulls I studied are now behind glass at the American Museum of Natural History [in New York] and [the people there] don’t like to move them.

Triceratops fossil at the Musuem of Geology in South Dakota, the offical state fossil

In 2010, paleontologists Jack Horner and John Scanella stirred up both dinosaur experts and fans by suggesting that Torosaurus fossils actually represented elderly Triceratops rather than a separate genus and species. What are your views about Horner and Scanella’s conclusions? I’m skeptical about [their findings]. It’s possible it’s true, but the transformations they posit are remarkable: The frill of Triceratops is solid and rather short while Torosaurus has an open and very elongated frill. It just seems that Torosaurus reverses all the trends you’d expect to see in Triceratops. [Horner and Scanella] made a statistical mistake by using auto-correlation with squamosal (side frill) bone length and width in their study, ignoring specimens that are outliers like the Torosaurus skull at the Academy. This is the smallest-known specimen and goes against what their study says. I don’t like the idea one bit. It’s not super-popular [among other paleontologists].

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Are there any mysteries about horned dinosaurs that you’d like to solve or like to see solved? I’d like to understand their diversity better. There was a very convincing Protoceratops relative from Hungary called Ajkaceratops and I was really impressed by that. There are also [large horned dinosaurs] known from the Eastern United States, which in the Late Cretaceous Period was separated from the West by an interior seaway that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska. We have teeth belonging to them from Alabama, so I’m interested in knowing what kind of ceratopsians were there. There’s an eleven-million year period — 76 to 65 million years ago — where they’re really well-known, and morphological gap between that period and Zuniceratops [from about 90 million years ago]. I’d love to fill that gap. Are there any aspects of paleontology or prehistoric life that you think deserve more public attention? I would say dinosaurs have the privilege of enjoying public attention, but they’re only a small portion of prehistoric life. Ted Daeschler is shining a spotlight on the earliest tetrapods and my colleague Lauren Sallan just did a TED Talk on fish extinctions. Fossil mammals are also very important.

24 Paleobiologist Lauren Sallan during her TED Talk on how species survive mass extinctions

As well as a paleontologist, you’re also a practicing Christian. How do your reconcile your field of study and your religion’s texts?

Finally, you’ve excavated dinosaurs on four continents. If time, money, or politics weren’t an issue, which countries’ bone beds would you like to explore next?

I don’t look to the Scriptures for guidance in scientific matters. What is the message of [the Book of] Genesis? It was written 3,000 years ago and expressed truths important to [its authors]. It was an expression of radical monotheism; in the beginning, God created the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, as opposed to the Babylonian account, where each of those was a god. The purpose of Genesis is not to say how God created all those things. Jesus didn’t come to save blue-green bacteria. He came to save you and me.

That’s a nice question. I could see myself working in Chile. It’s a lovely country just next door to Argentina, which is the third richest country on Earth for dinosaurs. They named their first dinosaur there in 2015 (Chilesaurus) and have a new ichthyosaur there as well. A lot of the North Saharan countries provide tantalizing possibilities as well. Paul Sereno has done great work in Niger. There are definite political issues, though, and some of those places have tough climates — you don’t go to Morocco or Egypt in the summer. My student Tony Fiorillo does work in Alaska, and a Belgian paleontologist called Pascal Godefroit is working in Eastern Siberia and finding interesting things there as well. They’re even finding Triassic dinosaurs — Plateosaurus — in Eastern Greenland. Can you imagine?

How do you respond to people who disregard scientific findings on religious grounds? I just think they’re putting faith in the wrong place and not seeing what God is trying to tell them. Galileo pointed out that the Bible mentions only one planet (Venus) and only says such truths as are necessary for our salvation; the rest is for us to find. Also, Saint Augustine said that “we do not praise God with ignorance."