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  1. Amnesic stegosaurus

  2. Dear @count_01 ,
    Your nom de Mastodon inspired me to visit the search engines and thence to Wikipedia where today I learned:

    "The term thagomizer was coined by [cartoonist] Gary Larson in jest. In a 1982 The Far Side comic, a group of cavemen are taught by a caveman lecturer that the spikes on a stegosaur's tail were named "after the late Thag Simmons".[1]

    The term was picked up initially by Kenneth Carpenter, then a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993.[2] Thagomizer has since been adopted as an anatomical term[3] and is used by the Smithsonian Institution,[2][4] the Dinosaur National Monument,[2] the book The Complete Dinosaur[5] and the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur.[6] The term has also appeared in some scientific papers describing stegosaurs and related dinosaurs.[7][8][9][10][11]"

    Among a long list of boyhood dreams that never came to fruition was my desire to grow up to be a paleontologist.

    As I enter my dotage it consoles me enormously to know that Gary Larson, whose sense of humor I revere, was responsible for giving some dinosaur tailbones an (informal) scientific name based on one of his cartoons.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomiz
    #Thagomizer #GaryLarson #Cavemen #Cartoons