Another common attractor is termed a 'Limit Cycle'. An example of this is our heartbeat. After an exercise, our heartbeat starts slowing down until it settles into a regular beat. If there are two limit cycles, we get a torus instead of a circle. These attractors are however well-behaved, i.e. they don't give rise to chaos.
Strange attractors are different, they are an integral part of chaos.
He plotted phase space and observed that it looked like the wings of a butterfly. Although he did not name it a 'Strange Attractor', this is the first time such an attractor is observed. He had discovered the famous Lorenz Attractor or Lorenz Butterfly. He discovered this 'banana-shaped' attractor while working on star clusters. But it was only in 1976 that he realized he had got a stange attractor.