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Nov. 26th, 2014 05:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfStuff I think about after an early morning anxiety spike has me wide awake.
So we have a batch of later ceratopsian fossils and they're all basically the same body plan with an amazing variety of different heads. Horner and other folks have found that some of these are actually the same species, just at different ages. Wikipedia's article on Styracosaurus talks about how lots of ceratopsian skulls have pitting and other damage but nothing that suggests a long period of infection and healing. There's obviously something going on with the ability of ceratopsian dinosaurs to reabsorb or replace bone.
So now what I'm wondering is whether ceratopsians were just great at producing variant crests, and if a lot of what we've found aren't true species so much as them speciating - that some animals with variant crests could still interbreed and it's just a minor variation, where other ones (and big groups like Pachycephalosaurus) really did break off thanks to geographic barriers or whatever, and kept getting weird little variations in crests.
So we have a batch of later ceratopsian fossils and they're all basically the same body plan with an amazing variety of different heads. Horner and other folks have found that some of these are actually the same species, just at different ages. Wikipedia's article on Styracosaurus talks about how lots of ceratopsian skulls have pitting and other damage but nothing that suggests a long period of infection and healing. There's obviously something going on with the ability of ceratopsian dinosaurs to reabsorb or replace bone.
So now what I'm wondering is whether ceratopsians were just great at producing variant crests, and if a lot of what we've found aren't true species so much as them speciating - that some animals with variant crests could still interbreed and it's just a minor variation, where other ones (and big groups like Pachycephalosaurus) really did break off thanks to geographic barriers or whatever, and kept getting weird little variations in crests.