Today's post is on Fulgurotherium Australe. I found this one by opening my largest book of dinosaurs to a random page and there it was. Fulgurotherium's name means "Southern Lightning Beast," which is a pretty sick name in my opinion. It received the lightning part of its name (fulgur) not ( disappointingly) because it had the power to wield electricity, but because it was found at Lightning Ridge in New South Wales, Australia. Interestingly the hip of this dinosaur was partially opalized, just like another fun Australian psychopathic dinosaur we know. Maybe Australia has tons of opal. Anyway Fulgurotherium is also interesting because it uses the name therium, and is one of the only examples of its usage where the organism named is not a mammal. Fulgurotherium thus finds itself nomenclaturally among a variety of densely furred rhinoceros and the like. But Fulgurotherium doesn't mind, because Fulgurotherium runs a successful coffee buisness, and of course (like most brands of coffee) it caters toward the mammals.
Ahhhh there were two jokes and I couldn't resist doing them both.
Delicious Fulgur's classic roast is made of only the finest quality low-growing Cretaceous plants, and is brewed using water from Antarctic glaciers to assure only the finest. But seriously, Fulgurotherium was a Cretaceous Hypsilophodon, and as such was an herbivore. It had the overall body shape of a theropod, but was in fact an ornithopod (like Camptosaurus). It lived in Australia, which during the Mesozoic was in the Antarctica area, so this would've been one of those crazy polar dinosaurs. The species was named off of a single hip, and that is to date the only positive fossil evidence we have of its existence. There are also some random teeth that have been attributed to Fulgur, but the accuracy of these claims cannot be ascertained without at least a jaw from the organism. Fulgurotherium is thought to have been 1-1.5m long, and would have been a fast runner, as this was a hypsilophodon's only defense from the savage parka-wearing allosaurs of the antarctic. Ahem. Anyway.That's it for today. Something else next time.
-Athos
Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska. The Dinosauria. Berkeley: University of California, 1990. Print.
"Fulgurotherium Australe." Australian Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
