STL Science Center

STL Science Center

25 September 2012

Arrhinosaurus in Print

For a little while there, about 60 years or so, we had a second species of Arrhinoceratops (Gilmore 1946). In 2005 that was overturned and the Torosaurus thought to be an Arrhinoceratops was returned to his genus (Sullivan, Boere, and Lucas 2005). The papers reporting first one way and then the other are, sadly, not available online as anything more than abstracts. The truth of that study of Gilmore's, however, is that the paleontology community was always a little skeptical of the genus shift and therefore most papers in the interim that mention Torosaurus utahensis refer to it as "Torosaurus (Arrhinoceratops?) utahensis" and never specifically call it an Arrhinoceratops. The original paper for Arrhinoceratops by William Arthur Parks (Parks 1925) is equally elusive; and that is more on account of its age than anything else as older papers tend to not make it to electronic media very often. Parks was a lot like Lawrence Lambe, a fellow Canadian, and was quite prolific at dinosaur naming in the 1910-1935 era, even naming new species into the last year of his life, sadly, though we do not have his naming paper for Arrhinoceratops. However, in a non-related note, Tuomas Koivurinne told me yesterday I can share his wonderful painting of Arrhinoceratops engulfed in a forest fire. It's pretty fantastic.
©Tuomas Koivurinne

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