John Scannella and Jack Horner, researchers at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, say that the triceratops is the same dinosaur as another one called the torosaurus. The skeletal remains of the three-horned animal are actually the undeveloped, juvenile form of the torosaurus:

Now Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. 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.

The torosaurus will now be abolished as a separate species and remains from it reclassified as triceratops.

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