Some fossils feel like old friends. As happy as I am to encounter petrified skeletons I’ve never seen before in museum halls, there’s something comforting about rounding a corner to find a cast of AMNH 5027 – the first Tyrannosaurus I ever met – or see Stenomylus, a little North American camel that I’ve encountered in exhibits from New Haven to Los Angeles.

The ancient rhino Teleoceras recently joined the club, too. Paleontologists have exhumed so many of these squat, tubby rhinos that almost every major museum in America seems to have one. And, because of its stubby-legged, barrel-shaped body, the 17-4.5 million year old herbivore has often been cast as “the rhino that