Podcast 232 - Obligatory Dinosaur Podcast 2: Dino Harder

The gang discusses two taxonomy papers about dinosaurs, fulfilling their contractual obligation to produce one dinosaur-centric podcast every 8 to 10 years. The first paper finds strong evidence to support the validity of Torosaurus as a genus separate from Triceratops and is quite cool. The second paper is that awful T-rex paper from about a month ago. Meanwhile, Curt remembers too much, Amanda enjoys self-righteous fury, James goes too far, and we all get way too drunk and rambley for our own good. CONTENT WARNING: This episode gets very salty and pushes past our usual frequency of just a few expletives per podcast. You have been warned.

Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition):

Our friends talk about two papers that look at big angry animals with no hair from the past. The first paper looks at a type of big angry animal that had a big thing coming out of the back of its head. There are a lot of these types of animals, but there are two of these types that have been a problem for some time. Some people think that these two types are two different things. However, some other people think that there is just one type and we are seeing the same animal get old and calling that old animal a new type that isn't real. This paper looks at some new parts from this other type that some people think is just one type that is old. They find that the parts show the animal was not old by looking at how the hard parts grow. This means that the two types have to be different and not the same. They also talk about the other parts of the animal that do not make sense if these two types are the same. So they show that we should instead see these as two different types of angry animals with a big thing coming out of the back of their heads.

The second paper is bad and no one should read it.

References:

Paul, Gregory S., W. Scott Persons,  and Jay Van Raalte. "The Tyrant Lizard King, Queen and Emperor: Multiple  Lines of Morphological and Stratigraphic Evidence Support Subtle  Evolution and Probable Speciation Within the North American Genus  Tyrannosaurus." Evolutionary Biology (2022): 1-24.

Mallon, Jordan C., et al. "The record of Torosaurus (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae) in Canada and its taxonomic implications." Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2022).