Brontosaurus, the once-iconic dinosaur famously bullied-for by Stephen Jay Gould, is now rejected by science as a chimera created by mistakenly attaching the head of one sauropod species to the body of another. Unfortunately, no currently accepted species has really succeeded in replacing it as the archetypal sauropod.
Brontosuchus is, so far as I know, not the name of any animal known to science, but the name suggests a monstrous crocodile, perhaps the Maha-makara.
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Note added (December 2): In a comment, NLR writes "The brontosaurii have forsuchus." I assumed this was a crocodilian respelling of "forsook us," but I googled it just in case it meant anything. The very first result took me to a Facebook comment thread summarized by a fake intelligence as "What are some goodbye rhymes for 'suchus'?"
Okay, these are terrible. "Farewell, gharial"? They could at least have made it a trisyllabic "fare-thee-well," but even then it only (kind of) rhymes if you pronounce gharial as Gary L.
In my post here, I specifically point out what the suffix -suchus rhymes with, namely the Yiddish word tuchus. People on the Facebook thread had the same idea.
By coincidence, I'm currently reading a book by a Gary L., and my latest post about it, "Gary Lachman spreads dangerous misinformation about Pepe the Frog!" prominently features the tuchus of a semiaquatic herptile who is closely associated with an ancient Egyptian god. (The -suchus suffix, as I noted in the comments here, comes from the name of the Egyptian god Sobek.)
4 comments:
The -suchus suffix comes from the Greek name for the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek, the very god I identified with the Maha-makara in the linked post.
Random thoughts:
I wonder if the current "time" being a year rather than a month has anything to do with God's teaching to Abraham (Tom B.) about the various worlds and their respective time. Kolob's time was measured or given as a day, for example, with the corresponding Earth time as years (one day on Kolob = a thousand years on Earth). So, to have the current time be in years might be a reference to our current state of being here on this Earth.
Months would be the interim measuring period between days and years, and could point to Numenor, which in my thinking is the Terrestrial Kingdom, or the intermediate step between our world and the Celestial Kingdom.
There are 12 months, and perhaps the 12 is relevant here - specifically relating to the apostles.
Dinosaurs came up specifically in my blog with the story "Sammy and the Dinosaurs", in which Sammy (a name which means "The Name of God") recovers his lost dinosaurs by calling each by name. They were also featured in the Lightning McQueen symbolism via the oil company Dinoco, which came to feature a T-rex in the logo but when originally seen in Toy Story had a Brontosaurus.
In real life, the oil company Sinclair features a Brontosaurus (though they now call it an Apatosaurus for the reasons you cite). Sinclair means St. Clair, which seemed like an interesting name.
Thinking of the connection between Sobek and Makara, I also think of Godzilla, who many think is some kind of crocodile-dinosaur. Despite being a crocodile-type creature, the name Godzilla apparently means something like "Gorilla Whale" in Japanese.
My dinosaur lore turns out to be out of date. In 2015, the name Brontosaurus was revived, it having been decided that the original Brontosaurus skeleton (with a different skull) was not actually an Apatosaurus but a close relative.
The brontosaurii have forsuchus
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