(Yet another reason why) scientists are cool....

Famous far side.

Well, just last night I was reading with Jake. We had gone to the public library and as usual we had walked out with something like this:

• 1 Dvd for Lily - usually a Disney movie


• 1 DVD for Jake - usually something from the "Land Before Time" oeuvre


• 1 DVD for Kim and I to watch that we invariably don't get around to.


• 3 or 4 books for Lily, usually split half and half between picture books (Curious George, eg.) and beginner chapter books (like this generation's Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jansen*)


• 2 - 4 CD's for me to arrrhsimilate


• A non-fiction book or two to keep the trivia flowing


• 8-10 dinosaur books for Jake

We've been going semi regularly for years now, and at this point Jake has checked out just about every dinosaur related book in the Kalihi-Palama library at least a couple times.

Well, they got a new one in and he found it. A very good one at that - lots of great illustrations and some fairly high level writing (for a kid's dinosaur book) that go into some pretty obscure topics like radiation, cladistics, classification, and more.

Anyway, we were reading about stegosauria and as I was reading I was surprised by the author's description of a fight with an attacking allosaurus. He said that the stegosaur "swung his thagomizer, striking the meat eater".

Thagomizer? No way.

Way.

A paleontologist and fan of the Far Side actually used the term in a peer reviewed journal article and the term has since become accepted scientifically.

*Cam Jansen should not be confused with Tek Jensen.