PhillyDeals: Newly discovered dinosaur named after local software firm owner

How do you get a giant creature named after you?

The world's largest dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus schrani - Schran's Fearless - honors Adam Schran, founder of a Philadelphia software firm, who looks and sounds as if he is still a student at brainy Haverford College, where he graduated in 1998.

Schran's name was pinned on by the dinosaur's discoverer, the rugged, precise scholar Schran calls "Dr. Ken." That would be Drexel paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, whose team found fossil bones of the 65-ton creature in Argentina's barren Patagonia region, shipped them home to Philly, and put scholars to work decoding them in his top-floor lab at Papadakis Hall.

As a kid in North Jersey, Schran was wowed by dinosaur museum displays, "like all little boys and girls." Two years after Haverford - as fun and idealistic, he says, as Drexel is practical and "action-minded" - Schran started Ascentive, now a 75-person, $10 million (yearly sales) Center City firm that markets personal-computer and smartphone "improved performance" software.

Schran has relaxed with adventure-tourism trips to Somalia, Kurdistan, and other places way off the main roads.

One cold night in February 2013, Schran's friend Becky Boudwin, then a Drexel fund-raiser, text-messaged Schran an invitation to a dinosaur party. Ascending the Drexel tower's five-story lobby with its "bio wall" of living plants, finding the lab full of Lacovara's smart students, Schran got a good feeling.

Hearing how the team found Dreadnoughtus, using Lacovara's training as a sedimentologist to track an ancient riverbed past one last hill to a dino graveyard, Schran saw Lacovara as a real-life Indiana Jones, a practitioner of the "spirit of discovery that I am always trying to explain to academics," Schran said.

Considering Archimedes' eureka moment, or August Kekule's discovery of chemistry's benzene ring after - supposedly - dreaming about a snake eating its tail, Schran wondered: "Why don't they just teach discovery?"

Schran met with Drexel president John Fry and other university leaders. "They invited me to make a contribution. They mentioned the species name would be part of that," Schran said. "That made me the most nervous. I've always had a shy personality. I'm a computer- science guy."

The Drexel people told Schran public recognition would encourage others.

Neither Schran nor Lacovara will say how much Schran gave. Lacovara said the gift "will fund several additional expeditions."

It's not just money, Lacovara said. "[Schran is] someone I would choose to hang out with."

"If that can help drive research, it's a win," the professor said. After all, Lacovara added, Roy Chapman Andrews, real-life model for fiction's Indiana Jones, "spent half his time at New York cocktail parties getting his expeditions funded."

How much does an expedition cost? Feeding them crackers, apples, canned fish, and grilled meat, Lacovara said he can put "10 people on the ground for two months for about $35,000."

A medical-research friend spends as much in a month on supplies alone as a dinosaur expedition costs, Lacovara said. "So if you're a philanthropist looking for a place to make your mark and get some bang for your buck," Lacovara said, "paleontology is a huge bargain."

When I last wrote about Schran, he and his attorney, Gerald E. Arth, were keeping mum about a $9.6 million "piggyback" class-action civil settlement that followed Ascentive's 2009 promise to improve marketing and customer-service practices, following a complaint by the Washington state attorney general.

After talking about dinosaurs, Schran broke that silence.

"People do have risks with their computers," Schran told me. "When we say, 'You have 400 issues,' you do. It's like having your house inspected; they will find things."

The state told Ascentive to train its customer-service people more, and exaggerate less. "And we agreed not to engage in that," Schran said. "But we feel we never did."