Albertaceratops

Oh, I forgot to mention how excited I am that they found a new big dinosaur, Albertaceratops nesmoi. It's cool for two reasons:

One, it's another example of an transitional fossil, which creationists insist claim don't exist. That's not why that's interesting; creationists say a lot of silly things that make no sense, and if you got excited over everything that proved one of their claims wrong, you'd literally have nothing to do but stand around saying things like "OMG YEAST!!" and "Have you ever really looked at the similarities between your hands and dog paws? I mean, really looked?" It's not particularly unusual in that respect, is what I'm getting at.

But it's interesting because we don't often find such fossils, and it helps us understand the connection between animals like Protoceratops and Pentaceratops. The difference was more than just horns: Protoceratops was about the size of a motorcycle, while Pentaceratops was about the size of a small RV; they lived in different time periods and different parts of the world. This new species was a type of horned dinosaur called a centrosaur, like Styracosaurus, but had long brow horns (over the eyes). Understanding how these animals were related is like a puzzle where we find random pieces one at a time, and a centrosaur with long brow horns is a piece that might help link a lot of other pieces together.

And if you don't mind me going back to creationists for a moment, one of their common arguments is that the fossil record does not support evolution because it's incomplete. Parsed through the puzzle metaphor, this argument would be like insisting there's no such thing as puzzles because you lost a few pieces of one behind the couch. It makes no sense. We've found more than enough other pieces that fit together in compelling-enough ways to say with confidence that, although we're not sure what the picture on this particular puzzle looks like, we're pretty darn sure that puzzles exist.

The second reason this find is cool is simpler. It's a new horned dinosaur. That's good news in and of itself; the ceratopsians were intrinsically cool.