Far out in the remote deserts of Utah, a group of researchers discovered a new dinosaur species, a discovery that the study’s author said provides a snapshot of a period in our earth’s history that had until now been unclear. To top it off, the new dinosaur species has been named after a CHamoru Legend. As with other dinosaur species, the new species Fo’na Herzogea, received two names, the first name Fo’na, is CHamoru, the native language of Guam, a U.
S. territory in the Pacific and also the ancestral land of the study’s author, Haviv Avrahami. “Naming a dinosaur is a hard process and it takes a long time.
I think there’s this view that when you name a new dinosaur, it’s discovered one day in the field, and then you give it a name the next day. That’s just not the case. A lot of work has to go into giving a dinosaur a name.
We first started finding these specimens of Fo’na about ten years ago in Utah. Then we had to bring them back to our laboratory in North Carolina and had to prepare them, and I had to study them,” he said. Avrahami, a Ph.
D. candidate with the Department of Biological Science at North Carolina State University, said the dinosaur has been the focus of his study. Before giving it a name, researchers had to first figure out if it was, in fact, a new species.
“The way we do it is kind of complicated, but I want you to imagine you are having dinner one night, and in one hand, you have a chicken leg, and in the other hand, you have a turke.