Hairy Museum of Natural History

The mounted skull and neck of Dracorex hogwartsia.
Photo from the Children’s Museum
of Indianapolis press release.

The lines between science and fiction blurred just a little bit today when paleontologists unveiled a dragon-like dinosaur named after the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” novels.

Dracorex hogwartsia, “The Dragon King of Hogwarts,” is a new species of pachycephalosaur whose skull was covered in a fantastic array of spikes, tubercles, and hornlets. The skull was first shown to the public last year at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, but its formal name and description have just been published in the latest New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin (part of the Federal Fossil Conference currently underway in Albuquerque). A team of researchers led by Dr. Robert Bakker decided to name the creature “after the fictional ‘Hogwarts Academy,’ invention of author J. K. Rowling…in honor of her contribution to children’s education and the joy of exploration.”

The skull of Dracorex presents an interesting mix of advanced and “primitive” characters. Like its close relatives and contemporaries Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch, Dracorex had a long snout and multiple rows of nodes and spikes across its nose and around the rear edge of its skull. Unlike them, however, Dracorex is missing one key pachycephalosaur feature–a thick dome of bone atop its skull.

Other flat-headed pachycephalosaurs are known from fossil sites in Asia, but these have a very different style of cranial ornamentation than Dracorex, Stygimoloch, and Pachycephalosaurus. The authors suggest that Dracorex is secondarily domeless–that is, its immediate ancestors were fully-domed, but Dracorex re-evolved the domeless condition of more distant ancestors.

Headbutting Dracorex.

Used by permission, © R. T. Bakker 2006
From the NMMNH&S Press Release.

Abstract–The pachycephalosaurid Dracorex hogwartsia, n. gen., n. sp., is a new pachycephalosaurin based on a nearly complete, and excellently preserved, young-adult skull from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation (Lancian) of South Dakota. D. hogwartsia shows an unexpected mix of truly very primitive and very advanced features: no dome; wide open supratempral fenestrae; large, spiked nodes on the squamosals; nodes of various shapes and sizes covering the skull including the cheek and snout; and a very long snout and tooth row. The so-called “primitive” nature of the skull (i.e.: the well-developed supratemporal fenestrae and discernable peripheral skull elements: anterior + posterior supraorbitals and postorbitals 1 + 2, suggest that these features are present as the result of paedomorphosis. Consequently, all previous phylogenetic analyses are considered inadequate. At least three pachycephalosaurins co-existed in the Lancian - Dracorex, Pachycephalosaurus, and Stygimoloch. Strong sexual-social selection probably generated the morphological diversity in skull shapes of these Late Cretaceous pachycephalosaurids.

Bakker, R. T., Sullivan, R. M., Porter, V., Larson, P., & Salsbury, S. J. 2006 “Dracorex hogwartsia, n. gen., n. sp., a spiked, flat-headed pachycephalosaurid dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota.” New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 35, p. 331–345.

*No tangential discussion of Harry Potter is complete without a reference to “Wizard People, Dear Readers”–Brad Neely’s unauthorized, delightful, and profanity-riddled re-envisioning of the film “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It is free for the download here.

Update: The NMMNH&S has a fairly extensive Press Release as well as this drawing of the reconstructed skull of Dracorex in side and top views, penned by Robert Bakker:

Used by permission, © R. T. Bakker 2006

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Dinosaurs, Recent Discoveries.