SIU's First Dinosaur Needs a Name! (And we need your help to choose one!)

Need more inspiration to come up with a great name for our dinosaur? Perhaps a little background or a few "fun facts" will help.

First, our dinosaur is a Protoceratops (pronounced Proto-Sarah-Tops). Its difficult to determine the sex of many dionsaurs just from the bones but as far as we can tell, our dinosaur is female. She lived in what is now Mongolia, about 70 million years ago, towards the end of the time in the Earth's history when dinosaurs dominated the land. The skeleton on display is life size, so when she was alive * she would have been about 6 feet long, which is small by most dinosaur standards. She walked on four legs, as an adult it would have weighed about 400 pounds and despite her fearsome appearance, she only ate plants.

As you can see from the pictures and from the skeleton on display in Parkinson, she had a large beak, much like a bird's beak (did you know that birds evolved from dinosaurs?). She also also had small bony horns on her nose and cheeks and a small "frill" or "shield" at the back of her head. A real beauty in her time! She used her beak to bite off tough plants that other dinosaurs could not eat. Her shield was not strong enough to have been much use for defense, so it was probably mostly for display, especially for attracting mates.

She was a social animal that lived in herds of up to one hundred or so individuals. Like other dinosaurs, she laid eggs in nests on the ground and was a good parent. In fact, scientists have found fossils of Protoceratops nests with young from several different clutches, indicating that young stayed in the nest for a considerable time as they grew up, which shows that their parents must have been providing for them. There is even evidence that care of the young was shared among the herd. One fossil has been found in which several dozen young died together along with one sub-adult "babysitter". Protoceratops is one of the smallest of an entire family of dinosaurs that includes much larger, and probably more familiar creatures like Triceratops and a host of similar animals. If you grew up watching "The Land Before Time", Cera, aka Sarah, was a baby Triceratops. Triceratops has also been cast in Jurassic Park and every dinosaur toy set includes one as well! You can see models of the skulls Triceratops and some of Protoceratops' other cousins in the display cases in Parkinson. Like Protoceratops, all of these creatures were quadrupeds (walked of four legs), ate plants, and had beaks, neck frills and horns; but most were much larger (up to 30 feet long and weighting as much as 9 tons!) and had much more developed horns, so in a sense, Protoceratops was sort of the runt of the family!

Protoceratops was small, and like many small modern herbivores (think wild sheep or goats), it was certainly vulnerable to predators, but she was not defenseless. Her main predator was another well-known dinosaur that you may be familiar with: Velociraptor. (If you only know Velociraptor from the Jurassic Park movies, you may be surprised to learn that these predators were actually much smaller than they were shown. The real animal was only about 6 feet long (mostly tail), less than 2 feet high and weighed about 30 pounds. And, it had feathers!)

We know that Velociraptors hunted Protoceratops. In fact, one of the most famous fossils ever found is the bones of a Velociraptor locked in battle with a Protoceratops. In that fossil, which is shown below, the Protoceratops has the Velociraptor's arm in its beak and the Velociraptor has its "killing claw" striking at the Protoceratops' side! Apparently they were fighting near the base of a sand dune and their struggle cased a small landslide that buried them both, trapping them in that position for 70 million years!

There are lots of other fun facts about Protoceratops that might help you come up with a great name for our dinosaur. Protoceratops' full scientific name is Protoceratops andrewsi. The andrewsi part of the name comes from the name of the first modern scientist to discover the bones of these animals: Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews was a swashbuckling adventurer, explorer and scientist that led numerous expeditions to remote locations around the world, including the Gobi Desert where Protoceratops was discovered. He later became the inspiration for the character Indiana Jones. That's right, in real life, Indiana Jones was a geologist!

Andrews may have been the first to describe Protoceratops in scientific terms, but he was by no means the first human to discover them. In fact, traders and travelers from Ancient Greece and the Near East were well aware of the bones that could be found in the deserts of western Asia, and they brought back their tales when they returned from the Silk Road. Not understanding that the world is old and that animals can go extinct, they assumed that they had found the bones of animals that still existed somewhere. (And no doubt local nomads were not shy about bragging of their bravery for having slain such beasts!) What these ancient adventurers saw were animals that were about the same size as a lion, but which laid eggs and had a huge beak instead of fangs. With this information they imagined a hybrid animal with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle - and from this the legend of the Griffin was born. (There are lots of other examples of ancient people misinterpreting fossils as the bones of mystical creatures too.)

Everything above is just a few "fun facts" to try to help you think of great names for our dinosaur. There is much more information available online about Protoceratops and similar dinosaurs that you can easily locate with your favorite search engine. If you find this stuff interesting and would like to know more, the Department of Geology offers a number of classes that might interest to you as well:

 Geology 121 - The History of the Earth (offered each Fall)  Geology 128 - The Dinosaurian World (offered each Spring)  Geology 221 - The Earth through Time (offered Each Spring)  Geology 329 - Geomythology (offered each Fall)

You do not have to be a Geology major to take any of these classes. Geol 121, 128 and 221 all meet the University core curriculum science requirement (when taken with their corresponding laboratory section) and Geology 329 satisfies the core curriculum humanities requirement. Have fun with this! Be creative! We are looking forward to seeing the names you suggest.

* Note the skeleton on display in Parkinson is a cast. After 70 million years, the actual bones are much too fragile to mount and display. So, in order to be able to show you what they are like, exact casts of the original bones are made and it is these that are used for displays both here and in museums elsewhere. The cast is an exact duplicate of the original fossil, right down to the fine details - even the sand that has stuck to the bones is recreated.