New Dinosaur From Museum Basement
Category Sci/Tech | Saturday, July 10th, 2010When Nicholas Longrich stumbled upon a fossilized fragment from a previously unknown dinosaur genus in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he rejected the traditions that usually govern dinosaur nomenclature.
Those conventions would have Mr. Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale, name the dinosaur after the area in which it was found, or use a Latin or Greek root for a physically distinctive feature. That is, after all, the method he used for three other genera he has named: Hesperonychus, Albertonykus, and Texacephale.