Deinonychus - one or two species?

[RaptorRKC@aol.com]

 Fellow dinosaurophiles:

I was just browsing through the archives and reading my old posts,
particularly those from around 1995.  There were a lot of names of people who
aren't hanging around anymore (whatever happened to them?).  But the most
striking to me is the absurdity of my old posts.  I acted like some sort of
know-it-all (but admitted to my ignoramousity at the same time!); basically, I
wrote a -lot- of ****.  It's amazing, looking back, how much I've grown and
learned over the years.  I still can't believe I wrote some of those posts!
Egads!

Anyways, on to the title scoop.  It seems that the new Deinonychus skull
material has pretty much put to rest the idea of Velociraptor-snouted
dienicks.  Rather, Deinonychus had a vaulted, robust skull all along.  I went
along with this development for a while.  Then, when I was talking to Greg
Paul at this year's DinoFest, I asked him if he was going to update his
Deinonychus skeletal restoration.  He told me that the skull with the
Velociraptor-type snout was probably real and that he was going to the Peabody
Museum to prove or disprove this idea.  

Does this Velociraptor-snouted "Deinonychus" really exist?  If this condition
is present in one of the "Deinonychus" skulls, that would imply that there
were really two dromaeosaurs wreaking havoc in the Early Cretaceous of the
western US.  Could somebody either put down or confirm this suspicion?  This
idea is really bugging me.  

One Deinonychus or two??

Rachel Clark

"The more we find out, the less we know."