a rose by any other name ....
With a name like Futalognkosaurus dookey its no wonder the other dinosaurs picked on him...
Yet another giant dinosaur has been dug out of the ancient rock of this fair planet. Clearly unwilling to be outdone by American or Japanese duck-billed dinosaur discoveries, Argentine and Brazilian palaeontologists have announced the discovery of Futalognkosaurus dukei, a massive plant-eating beast. According to the BBC, the …
Here' in my ignorance, I thought that naming conventions had to comply with Linnaeus' binomial convention. Naming a new fossil lizard using a local indian word and a bastardization of Duke Energy - well, has the convention of renaming perfectly good sports stadia to glorify major sponsors spread to the naming of fossils?
For the Americans out there, especially those from the more southern states, a dinosaur is what the rest of the world calls "dragons".
Most of the rest of the world also believes that they are the fossilised (fossilized (?)) bones of creatures who lived millions of years ago; rather than a couple of thousand.
And no, we also don't believe that they were put on the earth by the devil in order to make us question the reality that God created the earth in 6 days.
(skull & bones in honor of the fossil)
You ain't seen nothing yet, as they used to sing... Imagine what this fungus has to put up with: "Botryotinia fuckeliana" -- a real species name, I kid you not. Came across this gem yesterday while analyzing a genome... :-)
Regarding the naming conventions, nothing is wrong there, at least as far as names actually go. It's a binomial and it's Latinized. It does not matter where the words came from. "Orientia tsutsugamushi","Hyla japonica" or "Trypanosoma cruzi"
are far from pure Latin names, no?
>> a dinosaur is what the rest of the world calls "dragons"
Nonsense - the dinos that flew were never the big fat ones, and none of them exhaled fire. The evidence for dragons is the match in form and evolution of plasma instability discharges as documented by Perrat and others to the mythic attributes of dragons.