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
It’s an interesting question, because a while ago the answer would simply have been, “Because that clade of animals is extinct.” Modern genetic studies however suggest that many (or perhaps all) birds and turtles could be in the clade “Sauria”.
But that’s the rub isn’t it? Modern genetic studies come after the naming of these animals, and that’s the real answer right there. If we started naming these groups today based on what we know, that naming would probably reflect that Sauria still exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauria#Systematics
Saurus is latin for “Lizard”. Scientific names generally actually mean something, for instance Tyrannosaurus Rex means “King Tyrant Lizard”. If you looked at some modern lizards you could probably find a few that use ‘saurus’.
Pretty much all the dinosaur names we know are genus names, which are generally derived from Latin. The ending “-saurus” means “lizard“ since we named a lot of dinosaurs before we realized many of them were more like birds than lizards.
For instance “Tyrannosaurus” translates as “tyrant lizard” and “Stegosaurus” means “roof lizard” under the misconception that the plates lay flat like shingles.
The suffix “saurus” means giant lizard. While many dinosaurs aren’t technically lizards, when they were first discovered science wasn’t as advanced as it is today. We don’t have giant lizards alive anymore, which is why we don’t have -saurus animals now.
Because people needed to refer to this animals long before science did and they got normal names. Dinosaurs were all named by scientists after being discovered in the 1800s.
Animals also all have scientific names just like you described. We just don’t use them in everyday speech
“saurus” means lizard and was used to describe the apparently reptilian origin of dinosaurs. The use of “saurus” generally sets them apart from other modern lizards, snakes, and other reptiles.
Source: my Google-fu.
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.
Howler monkey, spider monkey, bald eagle, golden eagle, white rhino, Indian rhino, Northern giraffe, reticulated giraffe. There are variations on all of those animals, but this isn’t a full answer to question. I think it’s just because we tend to use scientific names for dinosaurs because those are the only the names they ever had.
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.
We don’t have common names for dinosaurs because there were never any humans who coexisted with them and needed a simple word to shout when one was right behind you. We just refer to them using their scientific names, which include “saurus” because of their resemblance to lizards. Lots of modern lizards also have “saurus” in their scientific names (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrhosaurus)
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