Tyrannosaurus rex is hands-down the best-named dinosaur ever. Its name means "tyrant lizard king" in Latin and Greek, which is simply the most evocative name in the history of Linnaean classification, especially when the name is attached to a 40-foot-long apex predator whose bottom jaw stands twelve feet off the ground.
Tyrannosaurus rex is the world's most widely-recognized dinosaur, the poster-child for all things paleontological (and awesome), and I have no doubt that the name helped make it so.
Names matter. Which is why the story I am about to relate is so funny/scary. You see, were it not for serendipity, and an accomodating International Code of Zoological Nomenclature which went into effect in January of 2000, we'd be stuck calling T. rex either Dynamosaurus or Manospondylus.
The horror!
Stick with me, my story gets better.
In 1892, Edward Drinker Cope pulled some vertebrae out of the ground and thought he had a ceratopsian (horned dinosaur, like triceratops) on his hands. He named it "manospondylus," which means "giant porous vertebra," in that poetic way of his.
In Wyoming, 1900, another paleontologist pulled some bones out of the ground and realized he had discovered a giant theropod (meat-eater), which he named "dynamosaurus," which is certainly a step up from "manospondylus," but nowhere near as awesome as what we have to call T. rex today.
Finally, in 1905, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote a paper about some samples Barnum Brown had dug up in 1902 and gave the creature the name "tyrannosaurus rex."
Only one problem: they had all found the same animal! And the rule of thumb for classifying animals is that whatever name gets published first is henceforth the official name of that species.
The name "tyrannosaurus rex" was suddenly in jeopardy, threatened by two unlikely challengers that were being bolstered by technicalities and stuffed-shirt regulations. It had happened before, just two years earlier. Brontosaurus, which means "thunder lizard," was renamed the anti-climactic Apatosaurus, or "deceptive lizard," in 1903, for the same reason that Tyrannosaurus rex was now being threatened.
So: what saved the name "tyrannosaurus rex?" I'll tell you.
Lucky breaks, that's what.
Even though Dynamosaurus was pulled out of the ground a full two years before t-rex, they were both described in 1905, in the very same scientific paper, in fact. The name "tyrannosaurus rex" appeared just one page before "dynamosaurus imperiosus," and thus, when Osborn realized they were actually the same creature in 1906, tyrannosaurus rex was deemed the name to have "appeared" first. Whew!
Manospondylus was an even closer call. Discovered, described, and named a full 13 years before "tyrannosaurus rex" was ever written, by rights we should be calling everyone's favorite dinosaur "manospondylus" today. Except for, again, a few lucky breaks.
Remember, Manospondylus was thought to be a horned dinosaur, until June 2000 (though Osborn himself noted its similarities to T. rex as early as 1917). That summer, scientists returned to the original dig-site and found the rest of the skeleton, which indeed turned out to be a T. rex. Gasp! Tyrannosaurus had to be re-named.
Except it didn't. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) is a multi-volume text which gets rewritten about every fifty years or so, which sets forth the ironclad, inviolable rules of naming stuff in the scientific community. Just six months earlier, on January 1st, 2000, the new set of rules had gone into effect, and they stated that, if the first name had not been used since 1899, and the second name had been used in at least 25 scientific papers in the fifty years proceeding the original specimen's discovery, an exception would be made and the junior name would become official.
Yay! T. rex was T. rex. Hopefully for good this time.
Perhaps you read about this drama a few years ago in the news. Remember when that council of planetary scientists axed Pluto from the solar system? That's what was at stake in the great t-rex/manospondylus debate of 2000, and, had the decision not sided with popular opinion, the fallout, I suspect, would've been Biblical in scale. I know I would've been pissed.
Granted, the debate was solved simply by checking with the rulebook, but, had that rulebook been written and implemented just six months later, we'd all be calling the tyrant lizard -- yeah, you get the picture.
Isn't life/the history of paleontological nomenclature a hoot sometimes?
--Serge
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