Monkey, salmon, pelican, turtle, cobra, poodle, alligator, eagle, iguana, geraffe, rhinoceros….all have unique names that don’t follow any major sort of naming system. I realize these are the general names and not the true scientific names, but why are so many dinosaurs all named with saurus at the end?
In: Biology
Monkeys, salmon, and all the others were existing species when mankind started naming things. And most of those people didn’t speak Greek. Except the Greeks, who called lizards *sauros*. The scientific naming of things didn’t start until the modern era.
The term “dinosaur” was coined in 1841 by Sir Richard Owen, who added the Greek word *deinos* (terrible) to *sauros* to descrobe the “distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles”. Dinosaurs are somewhat unique because the name covers a large range of animals that have no existing counterpart (we now know they’re distantly related to birds). So it became common to append -saur to names.
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