We’ve had a pig/hippo named after Mick Jagger, a spider named after Angelina Jolie, and a lemur named after John Cleese. And the trend for scientists shamelessly drawing on pop culture to name newly discovered species continues, with an ancient flying dinosaur named after James Cameron’s space opera Avatar.

The team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing named the new variant of pterosaur Ikrandraco avatar, thanks to its resemblence to the dinosaur-like creatures in the movie. The naming came after fossils were discovered of the creature in China’s Liaoning province, which showed it had a crest on its lower jaw just like Avatar’s winged reptiles.

The news was announced in a flurry of paleontology jokes: “Of course, nobody and nothing can ride this pterosaur,” said the institute’s Xiaolin Wang, while fellow scientist Alexander Kellner confirmed there were “no blue hominids during the Cretaceous”.

Cameron is currently preparing sequels to Avatar, which is the highest-grossing film of all time. Three more instalments are to come between 2016 and 2018, with Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana all returning.

The director is “in seclusion” writing the movies according to visual-effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, who has developed a 4K 3D projection system that could potentially be used to shoot and display the Avatar sequels.