Post APV5V9KdR3VBVwAAHA by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
 (DIR) More posts by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
 (DIR) Post #APV5V8ojLfytuzEgXw by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
       2022-11-11T12:09:54Z
       
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       I've already posted my FollowFriday today, so here's a Twitter tradition I'd love to see replicated here too:For #FossilFriday here's a photo of something very special, the jaw of the first Tyrannosaurus rex fossil to have ever been found, photographed at the #NHMLondon's Science Uncovered event some 5 or so years ago. I forget who discovered and described it but they wanted to call the animal they had found Dynamosaurus imperiosus. #Dinosaurs #Palaeontology #Paleontology
       
 (DIR) Post #APV5V9KdR3VBVwAAHA by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
       2022-11-11T12:09:55Z
       
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       If I am remembering the anecdote we were told at the time of the photo correctly, it was only through a quirk of academic publishing that the article  describing D. imperiosus appeared later in the same journal than one that called a second fossil found, Tyrannosaurus rex. It was realised at a later date that D. imperiosus was a T. rex too but if the article describing it had been first in the journal, the species would have been D. imperiosus from then on and not, as we know it today, T. rex.
       
 (DIR) Post #APV5V9rFTnad95QD6u by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
       2022-11-11T12:10:19Z
       
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       PS. I am not a palaeontologist - I just enjoy looking at fossils - and this is something I heard a long time ago, so it's possible/probable the above will need correcting from someone who is.
       
 (DIR) Post #APV5VANVXrOUl8VyOO by markwitton@sauropods.win
       2022-11-11T17:02:52Z
       
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       @JonnyT You're spot on with everything here, except that the naming order difference wasn't a matter of article orders: it was a _one page difference_. Henry Osborn named both Tyrannosaurus and Dynamosaurus in the same 1905 article and - as you indicate - had the order been different, we'd no longer have T. rex as a valid name. But the holotype referred to T. rex was stronger anyway - a decent chunk of skeleton, so Osborn was probably hedging his bets on the better name.
       
 (DIR) Post #APV5zYQqg5VS34ZFAG by markwitton@sauropods.win
       2022-11-11T17:08:23Z
       
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       @JonnyT Oh, and the name you're looking for as the discoverer of Dynamosaurus and Tyrannosaurus is Barnum Brown, fossil hunter extraordinaire. Although it turns out that Othniel Marsh had a T. rex tooth in his possession in the 1870s, and E. D. Cope named vertebrae in the 1890s that were also eventually identified as T. rex as well. We were picking up the signal of T. rex in the late 1800s but didn't know what we working with until the 1900s.
       
 (DIR) Post #APV6RZtcpNcUhKOFfs by JonnyT@mastodon.me.uk
       2022-11-11T17:13:14Z
       
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       @markwitton Thanks for correcting and adding to the story, Mark. Much appreciated. (I thought I was likely to get some of the detail of that wrong, but hoped I had the principle of the anecdote - the naming - right because that really stuck with me.)
       
 (DIR) Post #APV7JVsrxdxftLkrlA by markwitton@sauropods.win
       2022-11-11T17:23:14Z
       
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       @JonnyT This story is one of those quirks of history where something seemingly trivial - the order in which animals are named - has had an enormous impact. Would we be as obsessed with "Dynamosaurus imperiosus" as "Tyrannosaurus rex"? T. rex is basically a brand name now, I don't think that would have happened for the less elegant, relatively difficult-to-spell "D. imperiosus".