Wednesday, November 3, 2010

공룡!


A 'new' dinosaur (공룡, if you didn't guess) has been officially catalogued, the first time in the annals that one has been labeled indiginous to the Korean peninsula--and it's been named Koreanosaurus boseongenesis, in honor of that provenance.

A member of the family ornithiscia (bird-hipped), no one will be making movies about it, as it was fast-running herbivore, about three feet tall and 10 feet long, weighing in at 220 pounds. It lived in the Cretaceous, the last period of the Mesozoic, and spent most of its time being an appetizer for T. Rex and his homies, or burrowing into the ground to get away from them.

The fossil was found in May 2003 by a team from the Korea Dinosaur Research Center in Boseong-gun in Jeollanam-do, on the southern tip of Korea:


Here is a photograph of the fossil's "holotype" (the original or best early specimen) that I ripped from a copy of the paper introducing the new dinosaur:


The paper was published in October, and both the Chosun Ilbo and the JoongAng Daily (from whence I got the top image) ran stories today. A Wikipedia page was put up on October 19.

4 comments:

조안나 said...

Koreanosaurus? That's the best they can come up with? It sounds so... fake...

Tuttle said...

Good point. Here are some better (um, other) names:
Choseonosaur
Sejongodon
Kimchisaurus
Sojuraptor
Jisungopteryx
Betterthanjapanithus
Koreaisatops (kind of a stretch there)

Any thoughts?

Andrew Lasher said...

I think it is a fake, anyway. What are the odds it will be taken back in six months or less?

Anonymous said...

Uh...Expateranodon. ("p" isn't pronounced, naturally.) Doesn't really belong to us groundhuggers, I know. Yet... ;-)

A Korean guy