Making up For Monday

©Nobu Tamura

Chasmosaurus more than makes up for its lack of documentary appearances by appearing in massive amounts of documentation. This genus appears in everything from papers on combat in Triceratops to papers on predation habits in tyrannosaurs. Truth be told, however, about half of the papers I could read in their entirety have one source in common other than geographic localities of the remains of Chasmosaurus: Catherine Forster. Dr. Forster is right on up there in the starting line up of paleontologists working with marginocephalian dinosaurs. That is only the papers I have found on the internet of course, however, it is very apparent that she has done a great deal of research within the genus and so a few of the papers I have to share today contain her name.

The one thing I cannot find that I would really love to have are the papers that resulted from the work of Lambe and Sternberg, the original description and naming of the genus and the species within that. I did come across a JSTOR version of Sternberg's 1940 Ceratopsians of Alberta, unfortunately I can only read the front page of the paper. Two of the papers that are available, A Complete Skull Of Chasmosaurus Mariscalensis... and New Horned Dinosaurs From Utah... describe species no longer considered individual species of Chasmosaurus and, in the latter, contain the naming of a new genus from an old species of Chasmosaurus. Forster's pen inked part of the paper which named that species a Chasmosaurus as well; obviously that alone proves how long she has studied Chasmosaurus and Vagaceratops remains since it was a species of Chasmosaurus from 2001 to 2010 before becoming Vagaceratops. We even have at our disposal papers renaming C. mariscalensis as it is now known as Agujaceratops after reviewing the evidence at hand. There is even an article, which pops as its own PDF and thus I can only link the search results, about sexual dimorphism in Chasmosaurus. I enjoy articles like these because I was never one of those people that assumed all dinosaurs in a species were identical. I always enjoyed the idea that dinosaurs were distinctly male and female in one way or another the way most birds are. Anyhow, I haven't had time to read this one yet, but I am really looking forward to it so I'll share it with you readers.