It has been nearly 20 years since Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was released. Written by J. K. Rowling, the book was the first of a saga about a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The original seven books were adapted into an eight-part film series. In 2011, the last part of the saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 debuted in cinemas worldwide. Now, the magic world of Harry Potter is returning to the big screen. “Fantastic Beasts and where to find it” takes place in the Harry Potter Universe almost 80 years before Harry himself enters the scene. The story follows Newt Scamander, a British wizard and magic-zoologist. After being expelled from Hogwarts, Scamander joined to the Ministry of Magic and spent two years in the Office for House-Elf Relocation before being transferred to the Beast Division. Due to his extensive knowledge of magical creatures, Augustus Worme of Obscurus Books commissioned Scamander to write the first edition of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”.

Scamander travelled to numerous cities doing research for his book and in 1926 he arrived to New York, a city full of great economic inequality and where wizards were forced to hide. Years later, Scamander worked extensively with the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau, which led him on expeditions all over the world, collecting information for new editions of Fantastic Beasts. Published in 1927, Fantastic Beasts became an approved textbook at Hogwarts. Among the beasts included in the book are Acromantula, the Basilisk, Manticore and different types of Dragons. Most probably, Scamander would have included Dracorex hogwartsia in a new edition of the book.

Dracorex is known from one nearly complete skull discovered in the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota and donated to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in 2004. It was described by Bob Bakker and Robert Sullivan in 2006. The name was taken from the Latin words for dragon, draco, and king, rex, and the latinized name for Hogwarts, hogwartsia.

Dracorex is a dinosaur genus of the family Pachycephalosauridae, a diverse group of small, herbivorous dinosaurs, characterized by short forelimbs, stocky and powerful hind limbs, and a short, thick neck. Their most distinguishing feature was the development of a cranial dome, which is formed by the fusion and thickening of the frontals and parietals, and in some species, peripheral bones of the skull roof. Their remains are known from the Late Cretaceous of North America, Asia, and possibly Europe. The group include Pachycephalosaurus, Stegoceras, Stygimoloch and Prenocephale

Dracorex is similar to Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch, but differs from them in having a flat skull, four-spiked squamosals, enlarged supratemporal fenestrae and a skull covered entirely with dermal ossicles (knobs, rugosities, and spikes). In a paper published in 2009 , it was suggested that “Dracorex” and “Stygimoloch” represent younger ontogenetic stages of Pachycephalosaurus.

References:

Bakker, R. T., Sullivan, R. M., Porter, V., Larson, P. and Saulsbury, S.J. (2006). “Dracorex hogwartsia, n. gen., n. sp., a spiked, flat-headed pachycephalosaurid dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota.” in Lucas, S. G. and Sullivan, R. M., eds., Late Cretaceous vertebrates from the Western Interior. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 35, pp. 331–345.

Horner J.R. and Goodwin, M.B. (2009). “Extreme cranial ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus.” PLoS ONE, 4(10): e7626

Newt Scamander. Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2001