Kentrosaurus aethiopicus Hennig, 1915

Stoecker, Holger & Ohl, Michael, 2024, Taxonomies at Tendaguru: How the Berlin Dinosaurs Got Their Names, Deconstructing Dinosaurs: The History of the German Tendaguru Expedition and Its Finds, 1906 – 2023, Brill, pp. 233-254 : 3-4

Kentrosaurus aethiopicus Hennig, 1915

The genus name Kentrosaurus means “prickle-bearing lizard” (from modern Greek Κεντρί / kentrí meaning “prickle” or “sharp point”). Edwin Hennig, who created this name, was referring to the characteristic sharp spikes that run down the tail of Kentrosaurus . The specific name aethiopicus refers to the region in which the species was found and was chosen to distinguish it “from all previously … identified species” within the group of Stegosaurids, which had been found “exclusively in the northern hemisphere.” 59 He deliberately chose aethiopicus over africanus , explaining that of the two Latin forms in question, the latter had “already been used many times, in particular for dinosaurs in southern and eastern Africa.” 60 The words Äthiopien, Äthiopier and äthiopisch were commonly used in German until the late twentieth century to mean “Africa” or “African” and did not refer specifically to the region of Ethiopia in northeastern Africa; it is in this sense that the name aethiopicus was used. Until recently, the biogeographic region of Africa south of the Sahara and including Madagascar was referred to as the “Ethiopian” region. 61 When these various parts of the name are put together, Kentrosaurus aethiopicus means “African spiked lizard.”

A year after Hennig coined the genus name Kentrosaurus , he learned that the genus name Centrosaurus had already been introduced in 1904 to describe C. apertus , a dinosaur discovered in Canada. According to the edition of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature that was in effect in 1915, a difference of one letter (the initial C versus K) was not sufficient to prevent homonymy. Hennig therefore needed a new genus name, 62 and in 1916, he replaced his homonymous Kentrosaurus with Kentrurosaurus (“spike-tailed lizard”), deliberately echoing the first version of the name. 63 Starting in the 1960s, however, Kentrosaurus experienced a renaissance, and by the late 1990s, most paleontologists and science writers were using Hennig’s original Kentrosaurus and not Kentrurosaurus . 64