Lore Sjöberg likes dinosaurs, and thinks paleontologists have an awesome job … but that too many of them are phoning it in in the “naming newly identified dinosaurs” department:
In zoology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it. Normally this isn’t a big deal; at this point, the only living animal species being discovered are either some isolated sea slug or some type of antelope that everyone thought was the same as another type of antelope, but it turns out they can’t interbreed so — two different antelopes. In the latter case, everyone’s just going to keep calling it “an antelope” and in the former case, who cares?
However, there is one situation where animals are being given names that people are actually going to use, and that’s dinosaurs. Paleontologists have an awesome responsibility, as well as an awesome job. Whatever they name their long-extinct terrible lizards, that’s the name, and there’s a decent chance it’s going to show up on film or as a stuffed animal in a museum gift shop.
Some dinosaur names are ideal. Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is objectively the best name that anything has ever had, with Wolf Blitzer coming in a distant second. And there’s the Triceratops, which sounds cool and means “three-horned face,” and also Pentaceratops, which is, OK, kind of derivative, but I’m still hoping they eventually discover a Hexaceratops.
Sadly, however, not all scientists are equally inspired. Here are a few dinosaurs that, international rules for nomenclature be damned, need new names.
Like most kids, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and one of the (few) highlight of the public school year was the (usually) annual trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto with their dinosaur displays. Yet every time I happen to see dinosaurs mentioned in the popular press these days, it’s almost always some killjoy paleontologist trying to strike one of those cool dinosaur names by “reclassifying” to either an unreadable/unpronounceable Latin tag or a name that’s so heart-stoppingly boring that it might as well be a serial number.
Unless it’s some deep-seated conspiracy to make paleontology as uncool as accountancy or technical writing, I can’t understand why so many scientists seem to want to kill the natural joy so many of us found when we first learned about their topic of study.
Update: Brian Switek responds to Sjöberg’s complaints in the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.
Now, there are some dinosaur names that I’m not totally enamored with. While I understand the dinosaur’s symbolic status, Bicentenaria argentina doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the same goes for the unevocative Panamericansaurus (yes, named after Pan American Energy). Then there are the names that appeal to the more puerile portion of my sense of humor. Read the name Texasetes too fast and you may get the dinosaur confused with a part of the male anatomy (not to mention the actual debate over whether the name of Megalosaurus should really be “Scrotum“), and you should always be careful with the pronunciation of Fukuiraptor unless you’re actually trying to insult the allosaur.
But what baffles me is that Sjöberg didn’t pick any of these names. Instead, his list includes the likes of Spinosaurus and Giraffatitan. I get his beef with dinosaurs named after places (Albertosaurus, Edmontosaurus, etc.), and I agree that Gasosaurus was comically unimaginative, but Iguanodon? The second dinosaur ever named, and one of the most iconic prehistoric creatures named for the clue in its teeth that led Gideon Mantell to rightly hypothesize that the dinosaur was an immense herbivore? I have to wonder whether Sjöberg would consider “Iguanasaurus – the original proposed name for the dinosaur – to be a step back or an improvement.
I just don’t get Sjöberg’s contention that Giraffatitan is “terrible” because – *gasp* – the sauropod wasn’t actually a big giraffe. Strict literalism only in naming dinosaurs, please. And, really, what would Sjöberg suggest as a replacement for Spinosaurus? When Ernst Stromer found the theropod, the most distinctive thing about the dinosaur was its enormous vertebral spines. What would you call it? Suchomimus – a cousin of Spinosaurus – is a little more poetic, but I like Stromer’s choice just fine.
