STL Science Center

STL Science Center

26 March 2016

Back and Changing

I am altering the schedule of posts a very slight amount from the normal schedule. Instead of starting every week on Friday, from now on we will end our weeks on Friday. The day had only been the starting point prior to now because the first post had been on a Friday. The way the weeks are set up on the calendar a day like Saturday, Sunday, or Monday makes more sense as a starting point. We are going to go with Saturday here at Dinosaur of the Week because the start of the weekend is a good place to start your dinosaur fix of the week!

This week is the last full week of March. The last week of the month is the Brynn Metheney calendar week. This week's dinosaur, and March's calendar dinosaur, is the large crested herbivore Lambeosaurus. Lambeosaurus is named after the prolific Canadian paleontologist Lawrence Lambe. The material of the type species, Lambeosaurus lambei Parks 1923, was discovered and recovered by Lambe in 1903 and described and named by William Parks in 1923. Charles Sternberg described a second species that is still recognized, L. magnicristatus, in 1935 and a third species was added in 1964 by John Ostrom who reassigned Hadrosaurus paucidens Marsh 1889 as the material was inconclusive as Hadrosaurus and more closely resembled Lambeosaurus. The distinctive features of the genus Lambeosaurus include the large hadrosaurine body in addition to a head crest that acted as a resonating chamber and potentially as a space that could aid in regulating the temperatures of air entering and leaving the body. This may not be important for Brynn Metheney's astronaut version of the dinosaur, but in an environment with any type of variation in atmospheric temperature, the regulation of respired air was, and is, important to endothermic organisms.
©Brynn Metheney

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