Who says i’m not a stegosaur? (Image: EvaK/Wikimedia Commons)

COULD stegosaurus go the way of its beleaguered cousin, brontosaurus? Early last century, the big friendly giant of the Jurassic was stripped of its iconic name due to the obscure protocols of nomenclature. Now stegosaurs are in for a grilling.

Peter Galton, a curatorial affiliate at Yale University’s Peabody Museum, says the first stegosaur to be named, known as the “type” specimen, is too incomplete to compare with other fossils (Swiss Journal of Geosciences, DOI: 10.1007/s00015-010-0022-4). According to the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), that invalidates …