Fact 177: Does Sir David Attenborough have a dinosaur genus named after him?
Fact 177: Does Sir David Attenborough have a dinosaur genus named after him?
Yes Sir David Attenborough has, in fact, got a dinosaur named after him, the scientific name is Attenborosaurus conybeari, the first word is Attenborosaurus after David Attenborough and this is the genus and the species is conybeari and this is named after William Conybeare who discovered the extinct marine dinosaur in Dorset, England (uk), in 1880 and named in 1881 as a species of Plesiosaurus, Plesiosaurus conybeari.
The original fossil of the Attenborosaurus specimen was destroyed in 1940, during the Second World War, when a bomb fell on Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, luckily the pasta copy survived and later the dinosaur was renamed and reclassified in 1993 by the palaeontologist Robert Bakker who noticed that the dinosaur fossil was different enough from all the other plesiosaurs to deserve its own genus and he chose to call the genus Attenborosaurus.
One of the plaster copies is in the Natural History Museum in London and they have the most complete copy of the Attenborosaurus fossil, which is hanging on the wall in the Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery.
The Attenborosaurus is 5m (16 feet 4.85 inches) in length this is bigger than a parking space in the uk which 4.8 metres (15 feet 8.976 inches) in length!
