inhabitants. The other megafauna of the island, such as Stegodon florensis insularis and the giant stork Leptoptilos robustus, also disappeared. "Hobbit" nickname Homo floresiensis was swiftly nicknamed "the hobbit" by the discoverers, after the fictional race popularized in J. R. R. Tolkien's book The Hobbit, and some of the discoverers suggested naming the species H. hobbitus. In October 2012, a New Zealand scientist due to give a public lecture on Homo floresiensis was told by the Tolkien Estate that he was not allowed to use the word "hobbit" in promoting the lecture. In 2012, the American film studio The Asylum, which produces low-budget "mockbuster" films, planned to release a movie entitled Age of the Hobbits depicting a "peace-loving" community of H.floresiensis "enslaved by the Java Men, a race of flesh-eating dragon-riders." The film was intended to piggyback on the success of Peter Jackson's film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The film was blocked from release due to a legal dispute about using the word "hobbit." The Asylum argued that the film did not violate the Tolkien copyright because the film was about H.floresiensis, "uniformly referred to as 'Hobbits' in the scientific community." The film was later retitled Clash of the Empires. See also Ebu gogo – small humanoid creatures in the folklore of Flores Orang Pendak – short humanoid creatures said to inhabit remote, mountainous forests on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo References Citation Sources Knepper, Gert M. (2019): Floresmens - Het leven van Theo Verhoeven, missionaris en archeoloog. (Bookscout, Soest, The Netherlands) (= a biography of the discoverer of the Liang Bua, in Dutch) External links Hawks, John. Blog of a professor of anthropology who closely follows this topic. Scientific American Interview with Professor Brown 27 October 2004 National Geographic News article on H. floresiensis Homo floresiensis - The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program Blog commentary on the Obendorf paper. Washington University in St. Louis Virtual Endocasts of the "Hobbit" – Electronic Radiology Laboratory Nova's Alien from Earth documentary website, complete program available through Watch Online feature Hobbits in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolutions – Turkhana Basin Institute presentment at the Seventh Stony Brook Human Evolution Symposium Human Timeline (Interactive) – Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History (August 2016). 2003 archaeological discoveries Early species of Homo Pleistocene primates Prehistoric Indonesia Fossil taxa described in 2004 Flores Island (Indonesia) Extinct animals of Indonesia Pleistocene mammals of Asia