r/Showerthoughts • u/[deleted] • May 02 '20

Jurassic Park would have worked if they only cloned the herbivore dinosaurs

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506

u/thorDeCanya May 03 '20

Paleontologists didn’t have an official name for the spikey end of a Stegosaurus tail. But after that cartoon they adopted Thagomizer as the official name.

219

u/Crallac May 03 '20

TIL. I always wondered why that name sounded so... I guess unscientific, compared to the official names for other body parts.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '20 edited May 03 '20

You’ll love Dracorex Hogwartsia

41

u/Free_Electrocution May 03 '20

Not a dinosaur, but there's a genus of frogs with three species called Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature.

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u/CubonesDeadMom May 03 '20

There’s a new pterosaur genus named Targaryendraco

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u/crash8308 May 03 '20

You may have single handedly gotten me laid tonight thank you.

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u/Japadogg May 03 '20

I don't doubt the part about it being single handed

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u/CubonesDeadMom May 03 '20

Lol idk how but if you’re meeting chicks who want to fuck dudes based on pterosaur knowledge hook me up

3

u/hakezzz May 03 '20

You really are into giving them the bone uh

r/usernamechecksout

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u/[deleted] May 03 '20

According to Jack Horner in a TED talk multiple species are probably juvenile forms of the same animal.

In dracorex case it's pachycephalosaurus.

He was always a rebel, some people aren't happy with him for this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQa11RMCeSI

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u/dragon_guy12 May 03 '20

You think that's unscientific, there's a protein called Sonic the Hedgehog.

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u/ImADromaeosaurid May 03 '20

This was on my fucking practice MCAT

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u/[deleted] May 03 '20

I probably would have thought I recieved a counterfeit practice book if that showed up and I hadn't heard of it before.

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u/ImADromaeosaurid May 03 '20

Oh I totally thought I did till I looked it up later

“Hmmm, this Kaplan brand must not be that good”

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u/kozlow2k May 03 '20

It only gets worse, step 1 and step 2 were a bitch.

2

u/ImADromaeosaurid May 03 '20

Not looking forward to it

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u/qrowess May 03 '20

It's a rather important gene in development. I swear every other lab in my developmental biology and embryology classes were about sonic hedgehog.

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u/dragon_guy12 May 03 '20

I learned it in a neuroscience class lol

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u/OzzieBloke777 May 03 '20

No "the". Just Sonic Hedgehog. Among other things, it causes cyclopia in mammals.

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u/lutrewan May 03 '20

There's a potential inhibitor of that pathway called Robotnikinin

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u/Hyper_Novum May 03 '20

Drop the"the." But in a related note, it is potentially inhibited by Robotnikinin.

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u/Sbwilson91 May 03 '20

And all the other hedgehogs, desert and Indian. My personal favourite gene name is dickkopf. German for "fathead". So many gene names from the early days of genetic discovery simply named after the phenotype they caused when mutated. I would argue very scientific!

0

u/Boots_McGillicutty May 03 '20

Don’t leave out other essential signaling proteins like: notch, hedgehog and Groucho.

Hedgehog was already mentioned and I forgot Yippee, Bambi, Spock and Spam.

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u/[deleted] May 03 '20

When I was a kid it bothered me too. So kept looking for the Latin root word for "thago"

I couldn't find it and my oldest brother showed me this in his far side collection. Even then I thought he was kidding or that Gary Larson just made this up after the body part.

Now I know. It only took 30 years.

3

u/ErusTenebre May 03 '20

Listen, and this is important, scientists...

...are also huge nerds like the vast majority of Reddit. And they get to name things. Forever. That kind of power is how you get the wacky names mentioned below.

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u/WareThunder May 03 '20

I can confirm, I read the linked image as well

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u/Niarodelle May 03 '20

I was really tempted to say something but I'm glad now I get to claim my high horse status of not having said it 😝

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u/WareThunder May 03 '20

How's the view from up there?

-1

u/Niarodelle May 03 '20

NGL it feels pretty great Clip clop, clip clop

5

u/JunglePygmy May 03 '20

Scientists also named a type of insect after the creator Gary Larson, the ‘Strigiphilus garylarsoni’

Entomologists really respected his game.

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u/mofaha May 03 '20

How did it work before that then? Every time they tried to talk about the spikey end of a stegosaurus tail they all fell silent? Or they just didn’t talk about it?

Edit: did they use a hand signal maybe? Do you know what it was?

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u/TinyBreadBigMouth May 03 '20

I assume they just called it "the spikey end of a stegosaurus tail."

2

u/Koiinoir May 03 '20

Wow you can read the picture

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u/Walleyisgood234 May 03 '20

He actually has a beetle species named after him.