This premise is often explored humorously in cartoons and in movies.
Watercolor of a stegosaurus byKatrine Glazkova/Shutterstock.com
In 1982, Larson drew a comic depicting a prehistoric classroom.
A caveman is giving a lecture to an audience of other cavemen.
Before them is a large image of a stegosaurs tail.
But the thagomizer itself is real.
It turns out that this arrangement of spikes at the tip of a stegosauruss tail had no formal name.
Larson, being a biologist, was aware of the deficiency.
Mounted Thagomizer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Carpenter remembered Larsons cartoon that he read years ago, and he found the joke too good to pass.
That was the first time anybody, outside Larson, had used the word thagomizer in a professional way.
Smithsonian Institution’s stegosaur fossil display also has the label thagomizer.
Since then, the word has become a semi-formal term for that part of the stegosaurs anatomy.
In his bookThe Prehistory of the Far Side, Larson quipped:
I considered this an extreme honor.
You have to grab these opportunities when they come along.
References# The word: Thagomizer,https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125592-200-the-word-thagomizer/#http://www.dinochecker.com/dinosaurfaqs/what-is-a-thagomizer# Wikipedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
