This may surprise you, but the Ram 1500 TRX is actually not named after a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Naturally, when Ram announced that its rival to Ford F-150 Raptor would be called the TRX, the logical assumption that everyone made was that the name was derived from the T-Rex, a dinosaur that could take out a Raptor with ease.

Ram hasn't done anything to convince us otherwise and has played into this notion by including an Easter egg that takes direct aim at Ford's high-performance off-road truck. But Automobile Mag sat down with Ram's head of exterior design, Mike Gillam, who has now come out to explain where the name really came from.

As it turns out, the name came about due to time constraints. The idea was always there, but the bigwigs hadn't greenlit the project until one fateful day when the team was given just 77 days to start and complete the design, sketches, clay models, and beta components. Gillam goes on to say that "because of the short timeline, we actually had a sheet of craft paper up in the studio, and we had probably 200-plus different naming ideas. A lot of them were really cool, out there and exciting. And at the end of the day, legal couldn't vet any of those names fast enough for the reveal. So, it was really just a timing thing."

The decision was thus made to see if there were any unused names that Ram already had the rights to. One such name was TRX, which ran for a very short time as an off-road package. The team decided to go with it and didn't give it much thought until online reactions to the new name showed that fans of the brand had quickly made the connection with dinosaurs, at which point the penny dropped and Ram realized it had inadvertently come up with the perfect name for a Raptor rival. It's incredible that in these days of focus groups and surveys, some names are still special just by luck.