First, read this news story. Now look at the accompanying picture.
That's an elephant jaw. Well, elephantine. It might be a mammoth.
But it's not a dinosaur, and it's really not a Triceratops. The crackpot reporting team who broke this story needs to take a science class, or at least figure out that not everything big and dead is a dinosaur. I also like this sentence:
"The three-horned, bony triceratops roamed some 65 to 70 million years ago."
Triceratops was exceedingly bony.
Hat-tip to Will for bringing this story to my attention.
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5 comments:
looks maybe like a very geriatric mastodon?
most certainly a mastodon...but I wouldn't expect the Archaeologist who identified it to have known any better.
When I saw the photo, I knew it wasn't a ceratopsian since the teeth in the jawbone is nothing like the battery packed teeth seen in a jawbone of a ceratopsian. The jawbone in the photo looked more like a mammal jaw than a dinosaur.
Its a very geriatric gomphothere, actually. Probably Stegomastodon, because the angle of the jaw is less acute than Cuvieronius. Neat find. 'Bout as far removed from a trike as possible, though.
'doh! Stegomastodon of course, I should have gotten that. And I'd actually really hope that any university archaeologist would at least recognize have a decent grasp on the common pleistocene megafauna of their region...but I suppose I wouldn't be able to tell a Modoc basket from a Miwok one...
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