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Parma’s Daily Dino Fact
Dracorex hogwartsia has one of the greatest names ever given to a dinosaur. Its name means “Dragon King of Hogwarts,” a nod to the Harry Potter series, because its skull looks exactly like a spiky, mythical dragon. The fossil was actually studied with help from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and the name was chosen partly to get kids excited about paleontology — which worked.
Dracorex lived about 66 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous, right at the very end of the age of dinosaurs. It belonged to the pachycephalosaur family, the group famous for thick-skulled dinosaurs like Pachycephalosaurus, but Dracorex is unusual because it doesn’t have the classic dome head. Instead, its skull is flat and covered in long spikes, bumps, and horns, giving it one of the most intimidating head shapes of any herbivorous dinosaur.
Because of that strange skull, some paleontologists think Dracorex might actually be a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus. The theory is that as these dinosaurs aged, their skulls changed dramatically — starting spiky and flat when young, then slowly growing into the thick domes adults are known for. If that idea is correct, Dracorex wasn’t a separate species at all, but basically the teenage phase of one of the most famous head-butting dinosaurs.
Either way, Dracorex proves that sometimes the real animals that lived on Earth looked even more like fantasy creatures than anything humans could invent. It’s also metal as hell.
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