Tuesday, 24 July 2018

non sequitur

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we learn that the palaeontological community has formally accepted the name thagomizer for the anatomical arrangement of spikes on the tails of stegosauroid dinosaurs.
Coined in a 1982 comic by Gary Larson, the term was already in common-parlance, having been adopted and championed by several authoritative text books and museums and in the panel was named in honour of a departed caveman. We enjoyed seeing the Wikipedia stub on the naming waxing pedantic in pointing out, “The cartoon fate of Thag Simmons notwithstanding, stegosaurs and humans did not exist in the same era,” apparently not for the first time, as Larson suggested there be a sort of confessional whereby cartoonists can ask for absolution for such transgressions. A highly specialised parasitic louse that only plagues a species of owl in central Africa called Strigiphilus garylarsoni is named after the author.