Putting up a quick History Thread this week in honor of I. challengeri, a South American cousin of the Spinosaurus known to paleontology as The Irritator. This annoying creature is so-named because the original (indeed, to date the only) specimen fossil was located by amateur fossil hunters who crudely tried to restore the bones themselves. So annoyed were the professional paleontologists who examined the find at the amateurs’ efforts that they took it out on the poor dinosaur, dooming an otherwise perfectly respectable predator to be the butt of lame jokes millions of years later. (Its more respectable species name is a tribute to Professor Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.) Then again, I can’t feel too bad; if Irritator were so smart, he would have written Legendary Running Backs of the NFL.