First it was Dracorex hogwartsia.

Now it’s the triceratops.

John Scannella and Jack Horner, two researchers at the Museum of the Rockies, have compared the skulls of the triceratops with those of its close relative, the torosaurus, and decided that since dinosaur skulls can change shape during their lifetimes, the triceratops could merely have been a juvenile form of the torosaurus

So you see when they say “not existed” they mean “not existed as a distinct species.”

As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form.

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

Science! You’ll have to take triceratops out of our cold, dead, fossilized, possibly oil-bearing, hands.

via blastr, new scientist