What is "gordo"

Gordo (Spanish and Portuguese for "fat") may refer to:

Gordo was a comic strip written and drawn by the Mexican-American artist Gustavo "Gus" Arriola (1917-2008) that introduced many Americans to Mexican culture. The strip was praised by the Mexican Government and the California State Legislature for its promotion of international understanding. Charles Schulz described it as "probably the most beautifully drawn strip in the history of the business."

The strip introduced America to such now-popular words and phrases as "hasta la vista," "amigo," "piñata," "compadre," "muchacho," and "hasta mañana," as well as Mayan, Aztec, and Mexican customs, history, and folklore. Periodically, Arriola also included traditional Mexican recipes in Gordo that proved popular. He told one interviewer, "In 1948 we ran Gordo’s recipe for beans and cheese—which got me into 60 extra papers, by the way." Although not overtly political, Gordo was one of the first pop culture works that regularly raised environmentalist concerns.

Gordo was one of the first monkeys to travel into space. As part of the NASA space program, Gordo, also known as "Old Reliable", was launched from Cape Canaveral on December 13, 1958, in the U.S. PGM-19 Jupiter rocket on its AM-13 mission. The rocket would travel over 1,500 miles and reach a height of 310 miles (500 km) before returning to Earth and landing in the South Atlantic. A technical malfunction prevented the capsule's parachute from opening and, despite a short search, neither his body nor the vessel were ever recovered.

"Gordo", as the Barosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is known, is one of the most complete examples of the Barosaurus in North America (another one can be found at the American Museum of Natural History in New York). This specimen is over long and is on display in the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs.

In 1912, a Carnegie excavation team unearthed three nearly complete Barosaurus skeletons in a quarry in Utah. The quarry has become part of the Dinosaur National Monument Fossil Quarry, where a number of complete dinosaur specimens have been unearthed since its discovery in 1909. There are many layers of the fossil quarry, some of the earliest dating to 144 million years ago and over 70 tons of material was collected from the site for the Pennsylvania Carnegie Museum..

Around 1962, one specimen from the Pennsylvania collection was transferred to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, to be included in their new dinosaur gallery. Once it arrived it was put into storage, as the museum had run out of floor space in the gallery. There is sat for the next 40 years. In 2007, curator David Evans was on the hunt for an example of a sauropod (a group of dinosaurs including Barosaurus) to add to the ROM's collection when he read an article about a specimen in storage at the ROM. What Evans found was a nearly complete fossil of the Barosaurus. Today, the specimen is a centerpiece in the dinosaur exhibit.