Yesterday Clyde nominated the triceratops controversy as the likely topic of today’s blog.

Until he mentioned it, I didn’t know there was a triceratops controversy.

It’s an interesting situation, though. How rare and wonderful, to be the focus of a campaign to preserve your name millions of years after your extinction. We should all be so lucky.

A couple of paleontologists at The Museum of the Rockies, John Scannella & Jack Horner (oh the awful rhymes he has endured), have concluded that the charming three horned dinosaur we all know as triceratops is actually a juvenile torosaurus. Originally it was thought that they were two distinct types of dinosaur since the skull shapes were so different, but now it seems that dinosaur skulls were quite changeable over time and evidence has been uncovered that plots the development of the wee triceratops into the mature torosaurus.

This sparked indignation from triceratops defenders who challenged the theory because they don’t want to part with the name or the image of their favorite three horned beastie, nor do they want to let go of the idea that it can grow into a fearsome adult with jaggedy skull frills and no fenestration. Extinction is bad enough once. To top that with never-existed-ness is a terrible insult. The stage was set for a Pluto-like debate.

But wait! There’s a game saver!

It turns out the name triceratops came into usage before torosaurus, so under the rules that govern the naming of things that are no longer alive on the planet, the earlier title trumps the latter. Rather than disappear, triceratops takes over torosaurus’s territory completely, so now it is the torosaurus that is no more, and the name triceratops that will live forever, or until an asteroid crashes into the earth and erases us completely along with everything we think we know.

Happy ending? Apparently nobody loves the name torosaurus enough to put up a fight to preserve it. So in this case, it appears timing and popularity have led to a situation where the baby has taken over the adult’s name and identity completely.

The child is truly the father of the man, much in the same way the grown adult named Ron Howard will always be known as “Opie”.

Have any of your childhood features (physical or otherwise) survived the transition to adulthood?