The Thagomizer

"I got hit in the eye by a thagomizer." I never would have dreamed those words would ever come out of my mouth, and yet I uttered them not once, but twice tonight. Troy and I were upstairs playing with his inflatable dinosaurs, when all of a sudden his stegosaurus started going MMA on my spinosaurus! It was a brutal battle, but my spinosaurus was holding his own against the relentless onslaught of the stegosaurus’ vicious tail attack. Bobbing and weaving to avoid the deadly thagomizer on its tail, and going in for deadly bites of his own. It was back and forth until I caught the thagomizer in the eye, and it took me and the spinosaurus out of the fight. After a short break to recover, I was back in it. Until a short time later another wayward tail swing caught me again. After that, my spinosaurus was mostly just running around the room away from the stegosaurus, avoiding him altogether.

A fun bit of trivia about the thagomizer. Up until 1982, the tail spike on a stegosaurus' tail was simply called a "tail spike." In 1982, Gary Larson coined the term "thagomizer" in his comic The Far Side, which depicted a cave man teaching a class and naming the tail spike after the late Thag Simmons. Who we can only imagine met his end at the hands of one of these spikes (not unlike me in my epic battle tonight). 

About ten years later, the science community began to informally adopt the term "thagomizer" when Ken Carpenter, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, used the term to describe a fossil. It caught on, and the term has since been featured by the Smithsonian, the Dinosaur National Monument, the book The Complete Dinosaur, the BBC documentary series Planet Dinosaur, and most recently in Netflix's Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.

Gary Larson later addressed critics who indicated that most likely stegosauruses and humans did not exist in the same era. He wrote, "there should be cartoon confessionals where we could go and say things like, 'Father, I have sinned. I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids together in the same cartoon.'"