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Very controversial paper had just been published. I had some time to digest it. It's actually a surprisingly easy to understand paper because... it's extremely flawed.
The paper proposed to split Tyrannosaurus in to Tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrannosaurus regina, and Tyrannosaurus imperator. The paper suggests that an animal that lived on for a million year or more must have evolved some minor changes therefore making it a different species. This is a sound proposal! Triceratops has 2 chronospecies, and the same could be true for Tyrannosaurus. The problem is, the way the paper presents its evidence is not very convincing AT ALL.
Then there's the mess with the names. Neither regina nor imperator can be used due to a couple of odd technicalities in how taxon are named.
Then there's the mess with the names. Neither regina nor imperator can be used due to a couple of odd technicalities in how taxon are named.
- They split up Tyrannosaurus based on whether it's fat or not. That's like calling a fat man and a skinny man 2 different species of humans.
- The other trait is how many front teeth it had. Tyrannosaurus is notorious for not having a set number of teeth in its skull.
- What happens if a Tyrannosaurus is neither fat nor skinny? No idea and the paper admits this. Because the American Museum of Natural History has a Tyrannosaurus that's neither robust nor gracile. When you can't tell what species it is despite having a really good skeleton, that's not good.
- Determining species based on 2 traits is ridiculous. A lot of this observation could be explained by individual variation within the same species. Hell, if you compared 2 people's bones, you'd find more than 2 things different in their skeleton, but that doesn't mean they're 2 different species. Fat man is one species of human. Skinny man is another species of human. Longer leg man is another species. Shorter leg man is another species, etc.
- The naming of regina is also improper. The "us" in Tyrannosaurus is masculine, and regina is feminine. You can't have conflicting names according to the scientific naming convention. At least that's what I'm told. So the names can't even stick.
- Regina is also problematic in that the holotype listed isn't the holotype at all. If regina exists, the holotype has ALREADY BEEN NAMED back in 1995, BY THE SAME LEADER AUTHOR of this paper. Regina would have to be changed to megagracilis because that name was used first.
- It's not that it's impossible to have multiple Tyrannosaurus species. It's that this paper's method of determining a different species is extremely flawed.
- The lead author of this paper is the reason Jurassic Park mixed up the names of Velociraptor and Deinonychus. This is not an attack on him. He's done great work. However, his naming conventions for genus and species are very messy.
- The general consensus is that most paleontologists are not convinced.
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