Dr. Gellar v.2 wrote:william-james88 wrote:Dr. Gellar v.2 wrote:
This time, they got it right.
Or maybe they always got it right and you are wrong. I'm basing this off the official info here, and it refers to a species. So that's that.
Yeeeeeaaah...I'm afraid not.
But go ahead, base it off of what you you want. I keep telling you...there is no species of pterosaur known to science called Pterodactyl!
There is Pterodactylus, which this new toy\character Wingfinger definitely is not. The term pterodactyl and the pterosaur Pterodactylus are not one and the same.
You think Hasbro always gets it right?!? OK.....
Do you think this (the "Spinosaurus" drone from PCC Grimstone) is actually a Spinosaurus too, just because Hasbro tells you so??
Let's just all take two steps back and calm down. It's a single word in a single product listing, fairly insignifigant in the grand scheme of things. Not something worth getting riled up over.
That being said, the description itself is on shaky ground, and hasbro's track record for scientific accuracy isn't flawless, even in kingdom. The official product description refers to vertebreak as a raptor, even though it is distinctly and iirc by hasbro's admission a Dracorex, a pachycephalosaurid. However, while "Pterodactyl" isn't a specific species or a proper genus, it is a fairly widespread colloquialism for pterosaurs in general. It'd be like insisting that a lion is a
Cat. The statement itself isn't wrong, just nonspecific and misformatted, with a non-genus miscapitalized.
It doesn't help that pop cultural osmosis is super reductivist when it comes to dinosaur taxonomy. Unless one specifically goes through a hardcore dinosaur phase, many people are can really only list off the household names: T. rex, velociraptor, triceratops, stegosaurus, brontosaurus and pterodactyl, and anything that matches those silhouettes is close enough to just get filed there. What
really doesn't help is that originally, when the field was first starting out, the same approach was used scientifically. If it was a carnivore, it was megalosaurus. Sauropod? Brontosaurus. Pterosaur? Even if they were wildly different from each other, they were all Pterodactylus. Pteranodon itself was once part of "Pterodactylus". It took and still takes a lot of taxonomic reform and bookkeeping for the ongoing process to sort everything out, and even then, that info doesn't necessarily become general public knowledge. Most dino info only breaks out to mainstream in a timely manner when it has sensationalist headline potential, such as the feather controversy, or giganotosaurus and spinosaurus being bigger than the household name T. rex.
All this is to say, wingfinger's description is scientifically outdated, pedantically incorrect, but culturally recognizable to the layperson in the target audience, the latter of which is all that really matters to a toy company.
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