Getting Over TriceraFAIL

Illo by Homie Bear, via Flickr.

The world-devouring juggernaut that is TriceraFAIL continues to wreak its singularly depressing breed of havoc. Check out this weird piece from the Chicago Tribune. Or this one, from yet another clueless tech site with easily provoked commenters. Like ducks and bunnies on a carnival midway, the mistakes and lazy inaccuracies tick by, begging to be shot down.

TriceraFAIL isn't simply about sloppy, bandwagon-jumping reporters. It's a viral phenomenon, too. It appeals to some strong impulses. There's the distrust of science. There's nostalgia. There's the goofin' around factor. I don't blame the folks who start "Save our Triceratops" campaigns. In a strange way, it's comforting. People still have emotional attachments to these long-dead animals. That's cool! It's unfortunate that their actions have been inspired by crappy reporting, but at least they care.

Despite the debilitating rage I feel when I read another TriceraFAIL story, I think I've finally convinced myself that really, it's not that big a deal. I'm done feeling the need to respond to them. Science has plenty of problems with the media, and this isn't a particularly interesting one; I mean, it has to do with nomenclatural rules. No one who seriously wants to tell science stories thinks that naming standards or cladistics are going to ignite anyone's passion for science (anyone lining up for the first issue of Willi Hennig Adventure Comics?). And that's fine. Part of the challenge of writing about science is figuring out what needs to be communicated. I believe strongly in the elegance of simplicity, and if you look at those moments that nature made the biggest impact on you, I'd wager that most of them were pretty simple. The same goes for learning scientific concepts. That's why Don Herbert is so fondly remembered.

TriceraFAIL is a failure of science reporting, which is bad enough. Worse, it's a failure of science storytelling. It's a lack of imagination. It's being too bored to do more than a perfunctory scan of the source material.

If you're looking for another beacon of light in this TriceraFAIL mess, I have a suggestion. George Hrab deals with the Scannella/ Horner Triceratops paper on the latest episode of his Geologic Podcast, thankfully not misinterpreting the paper or freaking out about it. Instead, he sees it as a sterling example of science's ability to adapt as facts become clearer. There may be an odd little issue here and there - for example, I've heard nothing about the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruling on the matter - but such things are easier to forgive in this case. Hrab saw precisely what is wonderful about this story, and didn't get derailed by screams of misguided protest.

Leaping Laelaps, Indeed

In Friday's Vintage Dinosaur Art post on Charles R. Knight, I couldn't resist including his famous painting of E.D. Cope's theropod Laelaps, (which his bitter rival O.C. Marsh would rename Dryptosaurus in 1877 when it was discovered that a mite had the name Laelaps first). This sparked a conversation in the comments about the general reputation of large theropods in the late 19th century. In the early 20th century, the "ladder of progress" idea of evolution came into vogue and the dinosaurs became exemplars of evolutionary failure: beasts too stupid and ponderous to survive the mammalian apocalypse.

But it wasn't always like that; I knew Knight's painting reflected the view of the theropod as a dynamic, active predator and I wanted to dig into some literature and find where this began. It's not a completely thorough review of every mention of Laelaps, but I think I've dipped into enough from the era to give a good impression of just how dynamic a predatory dinosaur was thought to be. One quick note: I'll use both Dryptosaurus and Laelaps in this post, the former when discussing the modern knowledge about it, the latter when referring to it in a historical context.

As noted in the previous post and its comments, Knight was not an artist who did his own research, as Gregory S. Paul does today. Knight followed the most contemporary knowledge of the paleontological community and his individual patrons, which in this case was Cope. Indeed, in an early account of his work in The American Naturalist, Cope himself would invoke a modern analog when discussing Laelaps when he wrote that the long legs of the dinosaur...

...joined with the massive tail points to a semi erect position like that of the Kangaroos while the lightness and strength of the great femur and tibia are altogether appropriate to great powers of leaping.

Hardwicke's Science-Gossip, a short-lived 19th century pop-sci magazine, echoed this in an 1891 story and added a bit of gory detail:

The Laelaps was forty feet long, stood twenty-five feet high on its hindlegs, and was built like a kangaroo. It was the most astonishing jumper that ever existed, with teeth for cutting and sharp claws on the front feet, evidently designed for tearing out its adversary's eyes.

Taking it even further, Sir John William Dawson wrote a colorful passage on Laelaps in his 1873 pop-sci book The Story of Earth and Man, culminating with this image:

Had we seen the eagle clawed Laelaps rushing on his prey; throwing his huge bulk perhaps thirty feet through the air, and crushing to the earth under his gigantic talons some feebler Hadrosaur, we should have shudderingly preferred the companionship of modern wolves and tigers to that of those savage and gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic.

Dawson accorded Laelaps an even higher standing than mammals, a comparison that would be considered a bit absurd once dinosaurs fell from grace. Even today, when theropods are generally considered to be the "peers" of today's dynamic mammalian predators, few paleontologists would conjure the image of a large one leaping thirty feet.


A more modern look at Dryptosaurus, the artist formerly known as Laelaps. By Frederik Spindler, via Wikimedia Commons.

We now understand Dryptosaurus to be a primitive throwback compared to its more advanced tyrannosaur contemporaries; while the best known Late Cretaceous North American tyrannosaurs are from the west, Dryptosaurus lived on the other side of the Western Interior seaway that split the continent in two, on a land mass called Appalachia. Unlike its western counterpart Laramidia, we have precious few geological windows into this time in the eastern US. Dryptosaurus is an intriguing critter. Why did it preserve more primitive tyrannosaur features? What was its environment like? The Earth's geological processes have unfortunately hidden many of these answers from us, then made the region attractive to human settlement, limiting our access to Mesozoic rock further.

I can't end this without contrasting the taxonomic change of Laelaps to Dryptosaurus with Torosaurus being possibly absorbed into Triceratops. While Scannella and Horner have their work cut out for them if their lumping of the two genera is to be accepted, at least they don't have to deal with the level of rancor that existed between Marsh and Cope. After all, renaming a species because its name is already taken is pretty cut-and-dry, and requires little evidence to justify: just show that it's been given to an organism in the scientific literature, and the matter is settled. But notice that a couple decades after Marsh reassigned it to Dryptosaurus, Knight still chose Cope's original Laelaps for his title.

Is Triceratops a Damsel In Distress?

"The Triceratops May Not Be A Real Dinosaur," reads one headline, currently on the first page of Google results for Triceratops.

"The Triceratops Never Existed, It Was Actually a Young Version Of Another Dinosaur," says Gizmodo.

"The Three-Horned Dinosaur Triceratops Never Existed, Say Scientists," reads another.

A Boing Boing post, while not nearly as bad, also expresses confusion over the issue, with a predictably depressing comments section.

A facebook page called Save the Triceratops has also been set up. Part of the page description reads, "science wants to take away the Triceratops with its recent findings that suppose that the three horned beast never existed." It's also on Buzzfeed. The Facebook page has gained five followers in the last twenty minutes, as I write this. Clearly, this has struck a chord. (Update: After I commented on the Facebook page, the moderator sent the word out that it's all good. At least one subsequent commenter believes that the page succeeded.)

It's understandable. Triceratops is friggin' awesome. People love Triceratops. They love saying Triceratops. They love the funny way their children mispronounce Triceratops. I love all of it, too. I like the name Brontosaurus more than the name Apatosaurus. The thought of Triceratops being an invalid name is not cool to me. I wouldn't like it.

The really good news: Triceratops is safe.

Sometimes, especially in paleontology, a single species might be given two different names. This may have happened with Triceratops and a larger, similar animal called Torosaurus. When they were originally discovered, described, and named, scientists had good reason to believe they were different. But we progress, we learn more, we develop new ways of studying fossils. Science is a self-correcting process. Paleontologists John Scannella and John Horner studied many fossils of both dinosaurs and determined that the evidence heavily favored that Torosaurus is a more fully-grown version of Triceratops. When these issues are found precedence is given to the first name. Triceratops was first, therefore it's not in danger of being stricken from usage. For more on this issue, I suggest the thorough post at Dinosaur Tracking.

This mess is another reminder of just how much of paleontology is alien to most people. Not that I needed another reminder. There aren't many shining examples of nuanced portrayals of scientists in the media. Too often, they're either doddering boobs so obsessed with minutia that they're divorced from the reality they're supposed to explore, or they are rigidly deductive and cold to the point of amorality.

Are there scientists who fit those stereotypes? Probably a few. There are cops, teachers, and plumbers who probably do, too. Scientists are regular human beings. They've pursued specialized education, sure. They use jargon while debating ideas with peers, naturally. They approach their work with a high degree of skepticism and critical thinking, ideally. And none of this means that they're not emotional, passionate, messy people like everyone else. They have families and pets. They like certain foods more than others. They play video games. They worry about money. They're capable of mercy and kindness and rudeness and anger. On top of all this, they've devoted their lives to ordering the natural world for the benefit of our entire species. It's not an easy job, and it's not fun to clean up messes created in the early days of a discipline, when rules, processes, and standards were still being sorted out. So when you read a story about scientists debating a change in classification - like the Pluto thing - cut them some slack.

Yale's Torosaurus

I'd never seen the bronze Torosaurus statue outside Yale's Peabody Museum until Carl Zimmer used it in a recent post on his great blog The Loom, preparing for a speech there.


The Peabody TOROSAURUS, via altopower @ flickr.

The life-size statue was created by sculptor and museum preparator Michael Anderson and revealed to the public in October of 2005. Especially cool is that it's been placed within a Cretaceous-themed garden, stocked with plants related to those that Torosaurus and its kin would have been familiar with, including ferns and magnolia trees. It's a terrific, dynamic sculpture - the only minor demerit I can give is that it's missing is a saddle. Next time I'm in the northeast, I'm definitely checking this bad boy out.

If you've got a notion to, go ahead and buy a book about the statue's creation from the Peabody's poorly designed on-line store. They claim there's also DVD, but finding it on the site is harder than finding an actual Torosaurus fossil. Especially if you accept Jack Horner's assertion that Torosaurus is not a genuine genus, but is merely the most mature form of Triceratops.

Jack Horner on Skeptic's Guide

Dr. John Horner was the guest on a recent episode of the podcast "The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe." It's a really well conducted interview, which you'd expect from the Skeptic's Guide crew. It mainly deals with Horner's recently published paper which proposed that Stygimoloch, and Dracorex are not distinct species, but are younger forms of Pachycephalosaurus.

They touch on Dr. Robert Bakker's contention that this is not the case, and that he is in possession of a genuine juvenile Pachycephalosaurus that does not resemble either Stygimoloch or Dracorex. You can hear a bit of Horner's irritation as he basically dares Bakker to either publish about it or shut his trap. Juicy.