Dragon King of Hogwarts

With the impending Summer of Harry Potter coming up – both a movie and the final book in the series are due out – I thought I’d post this little gem from last year this time. A dragon-like dinosaur named after Harry Potter’s alma mater has performed a bit of black magic on its own family tree, say paleontologists who unveiled the “Dragon King of Hogwarts” last May 2006 in Albuquerque. Dracorex hogwartsia lived about 66 million years ago in South Dakota, just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs. Dracorex hogwartsia, which translates as “Dragon King of Hogwarts,” was unearthed in 2003 in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota by three amateur fossil hunters working in cooperation with the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. But it wasn’t until it was at the museum, while the fossil was being carefully prepared, that renowned dinosaur researcher Robert Bakker happened to catch sight of it while visiting. Bakker then recruited pachycerphalosaurs expert Sullivan and other paleontologists to take a closer look. read the whole story here.