Discovered Dinosaur Named After Ghostbusters Villain

The dinosaur is said to be 75 million years old.

By Alex Gilyadov

Scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum have named a newly discovered dinosaur species after the Ghostbusters villain Zuul.

CBC News reports a crew of private excavators accidentally bumped into the well-preserved ankylosaur skeleton while unearthing a nearby tyrannosaurus in the Judith River Formation in Montana. The plant-eating species, officially named Zuul crurivastator, is said to be 75 million years old.

Zuul crurivastator and Zuul from Ghostbusters

Due to the dinosaurs's strikingly similar appearance to Zuul, with its rounded, short snout and horns located behind its eyes, the Royal Ontario Museum's paleontologist and postdoctoral fellow Victoria Arbour and her colleague decided to name it after the Ghostbusters villain.

"Me and my co-author David Evans were batting around ideas for what to name it, and I just half-jokingly said, 'It looks like Zuul from Ghostbusters,'" Arbour said. "Once we put that out there we couldn't not name it that."

The dinosaur has a large tail with a knob of bone at the end that presumably could have been used for warding off predators by striking them in the legs.

Skull of Zuul crurivastator

Since they were able to retrieve the dinosaur's full skeleton, including the skull, tail, body, armor and preserved soft tissue, the scientists intend to further research and discover more about the new species.

Alex Gilyadov is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter. 

Let's block ads! (Why?)