Fulgurotherium Australe

Tidings Comrades. Sorry I haven't posted in ages, I've been busy with pretty much nothing. I'm just lazy.

        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.

Camptosaurus Dispar

Hail comrades!
         I was going to do Edmontosaurus, but again I just couldn't motivate myself to. I really wasn't sure what to do for this one, but I settled on Camptosaurus Dispar.
        Camptosaurus Dispar was an ornithopod of the group Iguaodontia, similar to the groups namesake (and one of the first dinosaurs discovered) Iguanodon. Camptosaurus lived in the Late Jurassic 150 million years ago, and was one of the first large Iguanodontids, as the group would only truly dominate come the Cretaceous. Campy was 5 meters long and lived in the Utah-Wyoming area. The name means "Seperate Flexible Lizard," which was an impressively difficult name to find the complete meaning of, since all the sources I checked only had the genus name's meaning defined (Flexible lizard.) I ended up finding the meaning of Dispar from an article about a species of moth, go figure.
        Camptosaurus was an herbivore and would've foraged for food close the ground. It had a distinctively arched back which would have helped it keep its face near to the ground. It also had remarkably strong thumbs, meaning the animal would have probably been one of the champion thumb wrestlers of the Jurassic Period. This has also led scientists to believe that, although its hips are primarily built for a bipedal organism, it could have moved around on all fours to better forage for food, as its strong thumbs could help support the weight.

Quasicamptmodosaurus be in yo cathedral, eaten all yo low lying foliage

        Camptosaurus also has an interesting story regarding its skull. Campto was long thought to have had a very boxy rectangular skull. This skull was discovered by Othniel Charles Marsh, the famous paleontologist, but it was recently revealed that this skull did not belong to Camptosaurus. This skull had actually belonged to a different animal, Theiophytalia, this whole time. Camptosaurus had a more sloping skull, as seen above. This is pretty ironic, since Marsh viciously mocked his rival Edward Drinker Cope for putting the skull of an Elasmosaurus on the end of its tail instead of its neck. But hey, at least Cope put the skull on the right animal.

        That wraps up today's post. I'm not sure what to do next, someone should suggest something. Leave a comment and I'll do it.

-Athos