Light & Verity

Hail to the lizard chief

Yale paleontologists name a reptile after Obama.

Obama: Pete Souza/White House. Lizard Illustration: Carl Buell.

Obama: Pete Souza/White House. Lizard Illustration: Carl Buell.

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A month after reelection, President Barack Obama got another, stranger kind of validation: a namesake lizard. In December, Yale paleontology postdoc Nick Longrich revealed in a paper that he had discovered an unnamed species of prehistoric lizard and named it Obamadon gracilis. Longrich and his coauthors, Yale professor Jacques Gauthier and Harvard graduate student Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, found the 12-inch North American reptile in a previously collected set of fossils. Longrich says they were “just having fun with taxonomy” when they named the species after the president.

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