When palaeontologists unearthed the skull of a previously undocumented dinosaur, it didn’t take the team long to figure out what to christen their discovery.
Analysis showed that the bone likely belonged to a carcharodontosaurid – an offshoot of the familiar Allosaurus. Given its unique domed skull, the researchers concluded that it was in fact a newly discovered species, one they’ve decided to name after the demonic Sauron from the Lord of the Rings.
The full name is Sauroniops pachytholus. It is massive bipedal carcharodontosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period. The paleontologists, Andrea Cau, Fabio Dalla Vecchia, and Matteo Fabbri, felt that the single fragment provided enough evidence to warrant the classification of an entirely new species, and their work describing the new dinosaur has since been published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
Joe Klemmer says
Works for me.