gorgosaurus
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From the genus name, Gorgosaurus, from Ancient Greek γοργός (gorgós, “grim, fierce, terrible”) + -saurus (suffix forming genus names of dinosaurs).
Inflected forms:
form: gorgosauruses
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: gorgosauri
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A tyrannosaurid theropod dinosaur of the genus Gorgosaurus that lived in western North America during the Late Cretaceous Period (Campanian), between about 76.6 and 75.1 million years ago.
pos: noun
examples: No. 1 is in the Stone age, the time when man went around dressed in a bearskin and threw rocks at prehistoric monsters called Ankylosauri, Gorgosauri or Triceratops.
The Gorgosaurus is notable for its ability to maintain a high speed chase for some distance, unlike the Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus. Also, it can bound for its full length in an attack leap! Like Allosaurus, Gorgosaurus is terribly jealous of its territory, but it will permit a female to range in its territory and often forms a mated pair hunting team for the spring and summer. Typical ranges are the same as that of the Allosaurus, but Gorgosauri will also enter swamps, sticking to the shallows and to the dry land of the mounds dotting swamps.
Having seen how quickly and savagely the gorgosauri and the allosaurus had devastated the exploration team, Ian and Rebecca had a fearful respect for the meat-eating species.
Gorgosauri are carnivores, usually hungry, and may attack anything encountered unless they have just eaten a very large meal.
Henry Beissel asks in “First Canto: Landscape,” “What artist dare raise his vision from the dead/centre of creation against this dinosaur indifference?” (CN, 7). Mention of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and gorgosauruses in particular, recurs in the Tenth and Eleventh Cantos as part of his geological imagery (CN, 45-55).
Hadrosaurs — duck-billed, plant-eating creatures weighing up to 3,600 kilograms — were the most common dinosaurs in what is now the park. The shallow water at the sea’s edge suited their partially webbed feet and provided vegetation for their diet. The water also served as a refuge from the giant meat-eating gorgosauruses that preyed on them.
In this context, the figments of Lesje’s imagination — the visions of gorgosauruses, pterodactyls, and iguanodons — function at the point of suture as the seamlike line of junction between her Imaginary existence and a symbolic one.
I think you have just killed three Gorgosauri or Gorgasaurus,^([sic]) whichever is grammatically correct. They are like us, misplaced in time. We saw one on the disk Fanny made with the first exploration ship. We were afraid they would come over the wall one day. They should have been extinct sixty-five million years ago.
In 1997, the amateur fossil hunters Cliff and Sandy Linster, digging near Chorteau, Montana, unearthed the skeleton of a dinosaur – a 72-million-year-old female gorgosaurus. Gorgosauruses are not particularly rare, but this one had an interesting quirk. Rattling around inside its skull was a bone ball. It was an extraskeletal osteosarcoma – a bone tumour – which would have encroached on its cerebellum and its brainstem.
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