“[While] rationalism [has] forced the dragon’s retreat into fable, the mythos and its attendant images nonetheless [remain.] Why else are the paleontologists so often guilty of emphasizing the supposed menace of their dinosaur discoveries at the expense of scientific objectivity? Why did they from the start turn their fossil-lizard discoveries into monsters? For behind the apparently clinical pseudo-Greek and Latin names for the animals lie bastard coinings, more dramatic than descriptive: hence, Titanosaurus (“titanic reptile”), Teratosaurus (“monster lizard”), and Gorgosaurus (“horrible lizard,” a la the Gorgon, Medusa), for example. Indeed, founding father of paleontology Sir Richard Owen began the trend: his Greek term dinosauria itself, meaning “terrible [or terror] lizards,” seems rather subjective.”
– Michael Delahoyde, “Medieval Dragons and Dinosaur Films,” Popular Culture Review 9.1 (February 1998): 17-30. Â
Paleontologists and paleo-artists occasionally deride pop-culture’s tendency to portray dinosaurs as monsters as oppose to actual animals. However as English Professor Michael Delahoyde of Washington State University has astutely pointed out, if this is a problem it’s one that begins with the paleontologists themselves.
Case in point, this week the paleontological world has been abuzz about ankylosaurs. Canadian ankylosaurs to be precise. First a beautifully preserved fossil skeleton of a nodosaur has been unveiled by the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Canada. The skeleton is so well preserved it looks like a statue.
The other story concerns a new species of ankylosaur which was actually discovered back in 2014 in a Montana quarry but whose bones were subsequently acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s this second find which has been the bigger news-maker, propelled beyond the pages of National Geographic and into mainstream news headlines undoubtedly in part because of paleontologist Victoria Arbour and her colleague David Evans’ decision to name this new species Zuul crurivastator, or “Zuul, destroyer of shins,” after the hell-hound seen in 1984’s GHOSTBUSTERS (Dir. Ivan Reitman).
This isn’t the first dinosaur to be named after a movie monster. In 1997 paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter named a Trassic theropod Gojirasaurus after the Japanese movie monster Godzilla, and in 2006 paleontologist Bob Bakker and Robert Sullivan dubbed a new species Pachycephalosauridae Dracorex hogwartsia, or “Dragon King of Hogwarts,” in honor of the Harry Potter series.
Point being, if paleontologists want us to stop thinking of dinosaurs as monsters perhaps they should stop naming them as if they are. Only, of course, I don’t want them to. Though admittedly perhaps it was a bit silly for a team of French paleontologists to name a recently analyzed new species of Brachiosaurus after a wyvern – I mean I don’t think you can get any further away from draconian anatomy then a gigantic sauropod.
Art of Zuul crurivastator by Danielle Dufault, © Royal Ontario Museum
