My History With The Name Edmontosaurus

Note: These are all just my personal thoughts and past moments about this dinosaur name. I am not the official authority on anything related to paleontology.

So it’s obvious that I'm really into dinosaurs and I have always been ever since I was really young. I always liked learning about all kinds of different dinosaur types along with their names and began learning about ones that are really cool. Then as I got older I began seeing more dinosaur names that either weren’t very creative or just felt lazy, which caused me to feel annoyed with their cases. 

But one particular dinosaur I’m going to talk about is the hadrosaur Edmontosaurus, which I was introduced to with this picture from The Dinosaur Dictionary section of Colossal Book of Dinosaurs my cousin gave me when I was little at the start of this post. I remember whenever I read other dinosaur books featuring this specific dinosaur, I thought that it was an interesting dinosaur name (meaning “Edmonton lizard”) that reminded me of the cartoon series Ed, Edd n Eddy (funnily enough, Edmontosaurus was named after the Edmonton capital city in Canada, which is also the very country where the show was created and produced). Then as time went on with me growing up and seeing the ever-changing world of paleontology, I started getting frustrated with the name Edmontosaurus and now, I get this feeling of annoyance and irritation whenever I see or hear the name. Why is that? Here are three reasons-

1. Anatosaurus

2. Anatotitan

3. Ugrunaaluk 

These three dinosaur names I had fond memories of seeing in very cool dinosaur books, seen in documentaries, or got recently named respectively have now all been lumped into Edmontosaurus as junior synonyms.

I was introduced to Anatotitan first and through the documentaries Walking with Dinosaurs and When Dinosaurs Roamed America as a giant hadrosaur that lived in large herds and as the favored prey of Tyrannosaurus rex. It also was a cool name meaning “giant duck”.

For Anatosaurus I first heard about this dinosaur name in a story book of the same name from the Rourke Dinosaur Library series (the book I mentioned is part of) that had the titular animal living its life in the Cretaceous period eating to survive and trying to avoid dangerous predators. The book was really colorful and showed lots of interesting animals within it that I found eye-catching as a young child.

Getting older and reading from newer books, I found out that Anatosaurus was lumped into the genus Edmontosaurus as a species of the latter name (E. annectens). I was bummed out by this, but still we had Anatotitan (which I found out was intended as a replacement name for Anatosaurus) which, again, was a really awesome dinosaur name.

However in 2013, I read on Wikipedia about how it was discovered that Anatotitan actually represented the mature form of E. annectens, which made the former another synonym of Edmontosaurus. This is when my frustration with the Edmontosaurus name started to rise as Anatosaurus and Anatotitan were unique names associated with my favorite moments growing up that involved dinosaurs and yet were deemed invalid.

Then in 2015, we recognized Ugrunaaluk for Alaskan remains that were labeled as Edmontosaurus sp. due to not properly studied for years and was featured (prior to its description) in March of the Dinosaurs and Walking with Dinosaurs 3D. I was upset that it wasn’t the original species of the Edmontosaurus name I assumed, E. regalis, and got it discounted from an official media appearance, but I still welcomed the new name of Ugrunaaluk for these arctic hadrosaur remains. 

But in 2017 (only two years later), it was shown in a study that Ugrunaaluk could not be reliably be distinguished from Edmontosaurus due its only known specimen being a juvenile and in 2020 was officially reclassified back to the latter genus.

Now this for me was the final straw. This was when I officially decided Edmontosaurus to be the most frustrating dinosaur name I’ve dealt with. I was upset about Anatosaurus being an invalid name for it followed by Anatotitan and now the newly recognized interesting name of Ugrunaaluk had been subjected to the same fate. 

Want to know another thing I noticed? Remember how beginning in the late 1980’s all Troodontid fossils from Late Cretaceous North America were simply referred to as “Troodon” causing the already recognized Stenonychosaurus, Pectinodon, and Polyodontosaurus to become its junior synonyms until the 2010’s? Well, I’ve noticed that the genus Edmontosaurus forms the hadrosaur family tribe Edmontosaurini that also has Shangtunosaurus, Kamuysaurus, and Laiyangosaurus. All three of those latter dinosaurs are only known from Asia and that means all Edmontosaurini fossils from North America get called “Edmontosaurus”. Sometimes, paleo-taxonomy can truly be a real mess and a massive pain in the rear.