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
First, birds are dinosaurs. Moving past that to the dead ones:
Nobody discovers and names dinosaurs naturally in a local tongue and has to talk with local individuals about the habits and behavior of a dinosaur and its effect on the environment. During the ‘discovery’ period of dinosaurs, archaeology was a scientific process by which we excavated and dug up bones, and had a big, world-wide conversation about what their environment might be. ‘Discovery’ of dinosaurs is a much smaller and more focused ‘field,’ as opposed to everyone else’s interactions with all the other animals. You might as well call ‘saurus’ a meme–we decided they were reptiles, or in Greek, saurus. So, the relatively small community of scientists just adopted the same naming convention for all the things they were digging up.
Also, not all -saurs/saurus are dinosaurs–there are different groups. Pterosaurs and others.
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