Ngwevu, a new sauropodomorph from Lower Jurassic South Africa

[Halichoeres]

Meet Ngwevu intloko (Xhosa: "grey head"), a sauropodomorph initially referred to Massospondylus but found in a new study to constitute a new taxon. It's known from a complete skull and a decent chunk of the skeleton.

Here's the skull:


Open access in PeerJ: https://peerj.com/articles/7240/

[Jose S.M.]

Nice! It's great that the skull is so well preserved.

[Halichoeres]

A nice write-up of the discovery, found in museum vaults by a student who recognized its distinctiveness:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190806101522.htm

[brontosauruschuck]

I wish there was a dinosaur pronunciation guide online somewhere.

[E.D.G.E. (PainterRex)]

I wish there was a dinosaur pronunciation guide online somewhere.

My dear paleo-nerd, never fear. For if something needs to exist, it already does! https://web.archive.org/web/20110611045710/http://www.dinosauria.com/dml/names/dinon.htm

I heavily doubt it is complete, and is real old, so you know, get what you get!

[ITdactyl]

I wish there was a dinosaur pronunciation guide online somewhere.

I'm actually glad that more regional names are being used. I realize that even as a kid, I disagreed with the idea that all scientific names should be in latin - even if I don't have a logical argument for why that should be the case.

but I do understand the frustration, especially since there's a growing number of dinosaur names with African (and Chinese, Russian, Spanish etc) pronunciations that are very different from the sounds used in English. Then again, it's a nice introduction to foreign tongues.

'funny how English tends to slide through vowel sounds while Xhosa seems to have invisible vowels. Ung (rung minus the R sound) - Guh - Where (minus the R sound) - Voo

[brontosauruschuck]

I was actually thinking about that this morning. I kind of have mixed feelings about it.

First off, it's basically impossible to make one word for something that translates into every language the same, because different languages use different sounds, not to mention tones, which is a whole other bag of marbles.

Secondly I guess the whole point of Linnaean taxonomy isn't disrupted by using whatever language the scientist in question wants for their naming of the species, as long as the name is distinct from all others. I also feel like giving dinosaurs a taxonomic name in the local language is a neat way to pay tribute to the place it came from.

I'm a little worried that if this pattern continues Latin will die even more, which is sad to me. Also, I feel like this pattern of naming things after the local language could discourage people from using Linnaean taxonomy altogether. When I was a little kid and I first learned that the names of dinosaurs were the same all over the world, I thought that was so cool. As an adult, when I moved to China, it's kind of silly, but I was upset to learn that they just translate dinosaur names from Greek to Chinese.

[ceratopsian]

Latin isn't totally gone yet. I am currently reading Statius' Achilleid in the original, just as my "normal" everyday book.

I like the principle of using names from languages local to the discovery. In practice I find it needs a lot more work from me to make them stick in the memory. My brain is familiar with the components of Greek and Latin-based names, so retains new names built from them more easily.  Still, brain exercise is good they say!

[Halichoeres]

I like the variety of new names, even if it makes me work a little harder. Scientific Latin and Greek aren't going anywhere--anatomical terminology, for example, is not likely to change very much.

[ceratopsian]

I like the variety of new names, even if it makes me work a little harder. Scientific Latin and Greek aren't going anywhere--anatomical terminology, for example, is not likely to change very much.

Absolutely - and as a Latinist, I would call scientific Latin "dog Latin" - it isn't the "real" language, same for scientific Greek.

[brontosauruschuck]

One of my drinking buddies told me that Latin is so difficult to speak correctly that in everyday Rome most people chose to speak Greek. No idea if it's true.

[ceratopsian]

One of my drinking buddies told me that Latin is so difficult to speak correctly that in everyday Rome most people chose to speak Greek. No idea if it's true.

No, it isn't true.

[Halichoeres]

I like the variety of new names, even if it makes me work a little harder. Scientific Latin and Greek aren't going anywhere--anatomical terminology, for example, is not likely to change very much.

Absolutely - and as a Latinist, I would call scientific Latin "dog Latin" - it isn't the "real" language, same for scientific Greek.

Very true! I only had one semester of Latin, so I don't know enough to see all the butchery the languages undergo to become useful English terms. I imagine that rankles somewhat.

[stegosauria]

In the past few years I didn't know how should I say the names of Magyarosaurus and the recently described Magyarosuchus. In Hungarian the magyar word means Hungarian and the 'gy' is one letter which of course is missing from the Latin ABC so I thought I should say it as if 'gy' wasn't one letter but two.

And the best would be a voicerecord for the really strange words. For example I don't know how could I explain the spell of the Hungarian 'gy' letter in English in written form.

[Halichoeres]

It would be nice to have voice recordings! I never realized that the GY in Hungarian didn't sound like the same combination in English. I looked it up and it's similar to the "ll" in some dialects of Spanish, so I have some idea what it sounds like. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for it is: ɟ͡ʝ

[stegosauria]

It would be nice to have voice recordings! I never realized that the GY in Hungarian didn't sound like the same combination in English. I looked it up and it's similar to the "ll" in some dialects of Spanish, so I have some idea what it sounds like. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for it is: ɟ͡ʝ

Yeah, Hungarian is quite a unique language. Sorry but unfortunately I don't know the Spanish language but in Russian the soft d is quite similar (when after the d letter there is one of the modifier letter).

We call this and the other similar letters two-digit letters (or something similar). I just write them down so you maybe will recognize that they are not what they seem: cs (in English: ch), gy (in Russian soft d), ny (in French gn), ly ( in Eng. y), sz (in Eng. s), ty (maybe in Russian soft t), zs (like the last sound in garage). There is the dz and the only three-digit letter dzs but these two are really rare. So most of the time the y is just the second part of a letter, it's rarely an independent letter in a Hungarian word (usually in family names with foreign origin).

This is the first time I heard about this International Phonetic Alphabet. I looked at that a little but I think without sounds it's a little hard to imagine which symbols mean actually what.

If you wanna know more about these two-diggit letters then on Youtube there's a few video where Hungarian people show and spell our letters. Or there's this site (the dictionary site of the Hungarian Academy of Sceinces): http://szotar.sztaki.hu/angol-magyar (sorry, this is Hungarian but you can search something and clicking on the speaker the computer will spell out the word(s)).