DINO-A-DAY #75: Wuerhosaurus

Welcome to Dino-a-Day, where we'll be highlighting one prehistoric beast per day until the release of our graphic novel Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth on January 4, 2011.

Each of the ninety-six creatures we'll be featuring on this blog are taken from a huge 2-page spread in the middle of Evolution. So while you can see each individual creature here, you'll need to grab the book to see them all together!

NAME: Wuerhosaurus
PRONUNCIATION: WER-oh-SAWR-us
ORDER: Ornithischia
EXISTED DURING: Early Cretaceous
DISCOVERED: China, 1973
FUN FACT: The spikes on the end of the tail of Wuerhosaurus and Stegosaurus is called a thagomizer, and was initially coined by cartoonist Gary Larson. Wikipedia explains:

The term "thagomizer" was coined by Gary Larson in a 1982 Far Side comic strip, in which a group of cavemen in a faux-modern lecture hall are taught by their caveman professor that the spikes were named "after the late Thag Simmons". The term was picked up initially by Ken Carpenter, a palaeontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who used the term when describing a fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting in 1993.

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Source: Wikipedia
Pronunciation: DinoDictionary.com