At the end of the 20th century there was a very curious petition to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature : that the name of Megalosaurus , the first dinosaur discovered by science, be changed to ‘ Scrotum ‘. Yes, it is exactly what you are thinking, the Latin term for “scrotum”. But to understand why, you have to travel back in time.
In the middle of the 17th century, and more specifically in the year 1676, a large fossil bone was found in a quarry in Cornwell , England. This bone came into the hands of Robert Plot, an Oxford naturalist, who included this bone in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677. Plot’s explanation for the fossils was very peculiar: there was a latent property in the earth that generated imitations of the anatomy of animals inside, even parts of the human anatomy. In his Natural History he described curious stones that had taken the form of ears, feet or kidneys. But Plott did not interpret this fossil bone in a similar way: he proposed that it must be the end of a leg bone from a large animal, possibly one of the elephants brought to Britain by the Romans. And we are talking about a time long before Cuvier spoke of extinction for the first time, so that all fossils -when they were not given strange interpretations- were classified as belonging to known current fauna. Some time later, after comparing the characteristics of this bone with those of current elephants, he rejected his previous hypothesis and embraced another: these bones must have belonged to giant humans, whom he refers to as antediluvian patriarchs. And it is that gigantology was for centuries a wild card for those findings that we still did not understand.
However, this fossil bone fragment became famous not because of that first interpretation, but because of a work by Richard Brookes and the interpretation of the philosopher Jean-Baptiste Robinet : a huge petrified human scrotum . In 1763, Richard Brookes listed this specimen as Scrotum humanum , possibly as a description of the external resemblance, rather than intending to interpret it as such. But Robinet took it literally.
This is traditionally said to be the first dinosaur bone discovered, which is more than likely. In fact, that figure has survived to this day and bears resemblances to the ends of dinosaur femurs. There were previous mentions of giant bones -such as that of the Valencian Vicente Mares in his work “La Fénix Troyana” – but without figures that can demonstrate such findings. So at least this one was figured and allows it to be recognized as a fragment of a dinosaur femur. What is not so clear is that it belonged, as is often said, to Megalosaurus .
Around 1815, more fossil bones of a similar animal turned up at Stonesfield , which ended up in the hands of William Buckland before 1818. The enigmatic material consisted of a fragment of a jawbone with teeth, a few vertebrae, ribs, and leg and of the pelvis. We know that in 1818 he had them in his possession because of the visit he received from the French naturalist Georges Cuvier , who was very interested in these bones. Cuvier compared them with other bones from Normandy. Both concluded that these bones belonged to an extinct species of lizard or crocodile. And that, therefore, the Earth had been inhabited by gigantic reptiles in the past. Good aim they had!
Buckland presented his discovery at a Geological Society conference in 1824, presenting this unique and gigantic lizard, which he estimated to be about 40 feet long, and which he named Megalosaurus. In addition, he proposed that these large reptiles had lived in a river and lake environment. However, he did not give it a specific name, it remained in the genus, and it was Gideon Mantell who added the specific epithet that we all know in honor of Buckland: Megalosaurus buckladii three years later, in 1827.
And with this, we jump to 1990. In that strange petition to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, it was suggested that the genus Megalosaurus should be considered a synonym of ‘ Scrotum ‘, due to chronological priority. According to nomenclature rules, when two different names have been given to a species or genus, the older prevails . And since Megalosaurus was described in 1824, but ‘ Scrotum ‘ was coined in 1763, this change was proposed. The authors of this petition were the paleontologists Lambert Beverly Halstead and William Anthony Swithin Sarjeant , who unfortunately are now deceased and we will never be able to ask them if it was actually some kind of joke. The Commission, of course, considered that ‘Scrotum humanum ‘ was what in zoological nomenclature we call a nomen dubium , a dubious name, since the figurations of Plot and Brookes do not allow that fragment of femur to be identified at the level of genus or species, and the original fossil was lost over the decades.
As if this were not enough, the fact that the name ‘ Scrotum humanum’ had not been used for two centuries made it a nomen oblitum , a forgotten name . And, finally, the fact that the publication with Brookes’s illustration did not intend to create such a scientific name or a description that supports it, makes it a nomen nudum, a “bare” name in the sense of not being accompanied by a description or identification. .
There have been other cases of problematic nomenclature: species named twice, misused nomenclature that needs revision… but this is undoubtedly one of the most curious cases.
References:
Weishampel, DB; White, N. 2003. Humble beginnings. In: The Dinosaur Papers : 1676–1906. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Sarjeant, WAS 1997. The earlier discoveries. In: The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sanz, JL 2007. Dragon Hunters: History of the paleontologists who discovered and studied the dinosaurs. Ed. Ariel.
Gascó, F. 2021. That was not in my dinosaur history book . Guadalmazán.
