Sunday, November 30, 2025

Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year

I dreamt that someone mentioned the dinosaur Brontosaurus, and I corrected her. All dinosaur names ending in -saurus, I explained, were associated with a month. The present time, however, was not a month but a year, so it would have been more appropriate to say Brontosuchus. I pronounced this latter name with an affected Galician-Yiddish accent, making it rhyme with tuchus.

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.

1 comment:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

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.

Dinosaur of the month, dinosaur of the year

I dreamt that someone mentioned the dinosaur Brontosaurus , and I corrected her. All dinosaur names ending in -saurus , I explained, were as...