Earlier this week, paleontologists Mark Goodwin and John Horner published a finding that has experts in the dinosaur world scratching their heads: the head-butting specialist Pachycephalosaurus is the same animal as two other dome-headed dinosaurs, Dracorex and Stygimoloch (pictured bottom, top left and right, respectively). Blasphemy!
But besides this eye-glazing argument about dinosaur taxonomy, Horner & Goodwin a bigger vision. They think as many as 1/3 of all dinosaur species may be mere redundancies, simply fossils of the same species frozen at different stages of life.
Horner & Goodwin's claim isn't their first-- last month the researchers along with Horner's grad student John Scannella proposed that Torosaurus was just a full-grown version of a Triceratops -- but it could reshuffle the dino deck, significantly decreasing the number and diversity of terrible lizards who lived in antiquity.
Image: UC Berkeley
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