Yep, you read that correctly, a brand new dinosaur(…’s skull) has been found in the Patagonia region of south America. Its amazing that after millions and millions of years new dinosaur fossils are still being discovered which can lead to the recognition of a whole new species of dinosaur. In this case, the dinosaur was part of the pterosaurs group, which is a extinct group of “flying reptiles”. This brand new type of dinosaur was named Brain Ancient; just kidding, its name translates to “brain ancient” its really called “Allkauren Koî”. But why was the dinosaur named this? These two additional websites may help answer that as well as show what the dinosaur might have possibly looked like. The name was probably given to this extinct animal because all that was found of it was an ancient brain(in reality the skull and part of the backbone and vertebrae was found). This find shows just how interesting the world used to be and it still amazes me that we are able to find remains of the beasts that ruled the world before humans.
Here is the fossil of a close relative of this newly found dinosaur (this dinosaur is in the same group, pterosaurs). S.W. Williston’s reconstruction of Ornithostoma ingens, a synonym of P. longiceps
To clarify, if you would like to see pictures, that can’t be shown on this article due to copyright issues, of what this new dinosaur Allkauren Koî might have looked like, you can use these two links that are shown below.
http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/allkauren-koi-argentina-04145.html
evansymes
My first reaction is that the Dinosaur namers seem to have gotten really lazy with choosing these names. Don’t get me wrong though, I appreciate their straightforward approach.
Archaeologist 1
“Hey I found an really old skull here”
Archaeologist 2
“Oh dope dude that’s a dinosaur, now you get to name it”
Archaeologist 1
“Sweet! I don’t have any ideas though”
Archaeologist 2
“Yea I never learned latin so I can’t really do the whole etymology thing”
Archaeologist 1
“Well we know its an old skull so lets just plug that into google translate”
Archaeologist 2
“Dude we’re big-time archaeologists we have to sound official… plug in ‘Ancient Brain’ ”
Archaeologist 1
“GENIUS”
Really though its pretty unfortunate that we weren’t alive to see creatures as massive as pterosaurs flying. It must have been a sight to behold to see a creature 16 feet long flying. While I was researching about the pterosaurs I came across a link that said that pterosaurs weren’t actually dinosaurs. It said that referring to the pterosaur as a dinosaur was as inaccurate as referring to humans as marsupials. I thought that was crazy because to me a dinosaur has always just meant an old reptile that lived a really long time ago and is now dead. I wonder if its arbitrary to argue over the minutia of classifications of species that have been extinct for millions or billions of years. here is the link
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-a-pterosaur-is-not-a-dinosaur-87082921/
Do you think these distinctions matter?