Ontogeny Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Paleontologist John 'Jack' Horner used ontogeny to prove in 2009 that the dinosaur once called Torosaurus was not a separate species but simply a fully grown Triceratops, potentially wiping an entire genus off the books.
• ✓Growth rings inside dinosaur bones, called Lines of Arrested Growth or LAGs, let scientists calculate a dinosaur's exact age at death, the same way dendrochronologists count tree rings to date ancient wood.
• ✓T. rex added up to 2,200 pounds per year during its teenage growth spurt between ages 14 and 18, which scientists confirmed only by comparing bones from dozens of individuals at different ontogenetic stages.
• ✓Ernst Haeckel coined his famous phrase 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' in 1866, meaning an organism's development replays its evolutionary history, a theory that is now known to be partly wrong but still shapes how biologists think about development.
• ✓Baby Maiasaura dinosaurs had incompletely fused bones and relatively large eyes compared to adults, two classic ontogenetic clues that told Jack Horner in 1978 that he had found a nesting colony of young animals, the first proof that some dinosaurs cared for their offspring.