What can be more touching than a small child nervously approaching the Texas Legislature and asking it to reconsider its choice of state dinosaur? In case you haven't been keeping up with paleontology developments from the Lone Star State, there's been a grass-roots push to change the state dinosaur from Pleurocoelus (a very obscure sauropod) to Paluxysaurus (a slightly less obscure sauropod). Now, according to the Dallas Morning News, 10-year-old Shashwatch Murphy has suggested a new candidate, Technosaurus.
So what's the big controversy? Well, first of all, it's not clear if Technosaurus was technically a dinosaur at all; this late Triassic reptile might well have been an archosaur (the family that preceded the dinosaurs). And second, compared to those big, galumphing, Texas-sized sauropods, Technosaurus was tiny, measuring only four feet long. In its favor, Murphy points out, Technosaurus was named after Texas Tech University and predated Paluxysaurus by a hundred million years. Stay tuned for more developments!
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