Re: Goofy dinosaur names: WAS Tsaagan mangas - new dromaeosaurid from Mongolia

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 12/12/06, Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au> wrote:
> T. Michael Keesey writes:
> Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature:
> > http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/taxonomy.html
>
> I've always thought that Megalosaurus should be changed back to its original
> name. Public interest in dinosaurs would go through the roof (although
> mostly due to accidental Google searches).

I believe this has been brought up before, but the "original name" is
really just a Latin caption to an illustration, written well before
Linnaeus' work on binomial nomenclature. (Also, CMIIW, but there's no
guarantee that that fragment belongs to the same species as the M.
bucklandi type specimen.)

> In fact, if I had mispelled the word 'public' this post would have been even
> more apt.

Hehe!

While on the subject of the Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature
website, I once suggested adding Quilmesaurus to the "Drugs and
Alcohol" section, but the original publication does not specify
whether it is named after the beer, the city, or the tribe.
--
T. Michael Keesey
The Dinosauricon: http://dino.lm.com
Parry & Carney: http://parryandcarney.com
ISPN Forum: http://www.phylonames.org/forum/