Dracorex hogwartsia
Three updates in a day!
I used to admire and respect Robert Bakker, the enfant terrible of vertebrate palaeontology- many of his ideas in "The Dinosaur Heresies" were wrong, but at least they were interestingly wrong, in a way that made people say "that can't be right, lets go out and show the beardie hippie that he's wrong". Now I'm beginning to think he's going a bit daft. Ok so naming a plesiosaurus Attenboroughsaurus is perfectly sensible. But hogwarts?
And then Metro, ever the bastion of accurate scientific reporting states that this animal is important because:
A: Its named after bloody HP's bloody school, what next? Opusdeius danbrowni? The name you give an animal doesn't matter unless another animal already has it. I know it shouldn't annoy me, and to be honest it doesn't - not compared to reason B. However naming things after popular culture items is always a little dodgy. So many things don't last. I could name a species after Crom, Conan's god. But I don't think anyone else (other than
steely_glint, and some of the other people I know would know what the bloody hell I was on about.)
B: Its the only dinosaur with a flat head known from the Cretaceous. Nooo! Its the only Pachycephalosaur with a flat head known from the Upper Cretaceous of North America- there's a couple of "flat-headed pachycephalosaurs" from Europe - Yaverlandia from the Isle of Wight fr'instance. Not to mention all the dinosaurs that aren't Pachycephalosaurs that have flat heads.
Damn you Metro and your utterly hopeless science reporting.