Last year one of the most infamous personalities in paleontology today, Bob Bakker, published a paper announcing a new species of pachycephalosaur: Dracorex hogwartsia. The specimen is housed in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and Bakker noted its resemblance to mythical dragons and took that into account when deciding on the nomenclature. Draco means dragon (which explains a lot about the personality of everyone's favorite magical brat, Draco Malfoy), and rex means king....and the second par, "hogwartsia", is a hat-tip to Rowlings and all of her fans.
(Just as a nit-picky note on nomenclature, the name Dracorex hogwartsia does not imply that this species was/is actually found at Hogwarts, since the proper suffix to indicate an animal is named after its place of discovery is either -ensis or -iensis.)
Despite being tagged the "dragon king," D. hogwartsia was an herbivore. It was not your average sedentary cud-chewer, however: there is evidence that pachycephalosaurs engaged in vigorous competition for mates (thus the fancy headgear). Their vertebrae are adapted to sustain high impacts and strenous twisting to protect their spines from these impacts.
The specimen is about 66 million years old, putting these "dragons" in the late Cretaceous. It is an interesting creature because it has a flat, spiky head, unlike the dome-shaped skulls of other pachycephalosaurs.
Here were Rowling's comments on having a dinosaur named after her creation:
"The naming of Dracorex hogwartsia is easily the most unexpected honour to have come my way since the publication of the Harry Potter books! I am absolutely thrilled to think that Hogwarts has made a small (claw?) mark upon the fascinating world of dinosaurs.
I happen to know more on the subject of paleontology than many might credit, because my eldest daughter was Utahraptor-obsessed and I am now living with a passionate Tyrannosaurus rex-lover, aged three.
My credibility has soared within my science-loving family, and I am very much looking forward to reading Dr. Bakker's paper describing 'my' dinosaur, which I can't help visualising as a slightly less pyromaniac Hungarian Horntail."(Thanks to grrrlscientist for the quote)
3 comments:
Nitpick alert: all that stuff about pachycephalosaurs being specially adapted to whack each other with their heads (you refer to special features of the neck vertebrae) is not correct. In fact it has been argued that the pachycephalosaur neck was not adapted for the transmission of forces, and in fact the neck vertebrae become disarticulated when the neck is straightened. Furthermore, their skulls are too highly vascularised to withstand hard impact.
They might have done a bit of pushing and shoving with their heads, but it now seems most likely that the skull domes and decorative lumps and bumps they possessed were more to do with visual display: they weren't whacking their heads together like sheep or goats. Bakker's drawing shows Dracorex engaging in head-to-head combat, so I guess he disagrees with this however!
Just happened on this. Nice piece -- but did you really mean to call Bakker "infamous"? That means "evil", or "of evil repute", whereas at worst Bakker's merely annoying, and creatively so. If it weren't for those early Scientific American papers with Ostrom, the establishment might still be showing us dinos as tail-dragging lizards. Choose the words carefully!
I did use infamous, although it was intended to be satirical, I have a lot of respect for Bakker but there has been controversy over some of his ideas as well (sauropods with trunks, for example) that have upset some more orthodox people, the "infamous" comment was purely in jest. ;)
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