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About Dracorex:
The full name of this pachycephalosaur, or bone-headed dinosaur, is Dracorex hogwartsia (Dragon King of Hogwarts), and as you might have guessed, there's a story behind this. After it was dug up in 2004, in South Dakota's Hell Creek formation, the partial skull of this dinosaur was donated to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, which invited visiting kids to name it as a promotional stunt. (Considering the other possibilities, though, the allusion to the Harry Potter books doesn't seem quite so bad!)
There's some controversy about Dracorex among paleontologists, some of whom think this is really a species of the very similar-looking Stygimoloch (whose much less child-friendly name means "horned demon from the river of hell.") The latest news: a research team has concluded that both Dracorex and Stygimoloch represented earlier growth stages of yet another dinosaur genus, Pachycephalosaurus, though this conclusion hasn't been accepted by everyone in the scientific community. What this means is that, as Pachycephalosaurus juveniles grew, their head ornamentation became more and more elaborate, so adults looked very different from teenagers (and teenagers looked very different from babies).
However it winds up being classified, Dracorex was a classic pachycephalosaur, with an unusually thick, ornamented, vaguely demonic-looking skull. Males of this relatively slender, two-legged dinosaur probably head-butted each other for dominance within the herd (not to mention the right to mate with females), though it's possible that Dracorex's head armor also served to intimidate predators.
