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
Not to nitpick but “rhinoceros” actually follows a very similar naming pattern as the ‘-saurus’. “Rhino-“= nose, “-ceros” = horn. Rhinoceros = Nosehorn. Triceratops = three-horn-face. Very similar to rhinoceros.
Similarly, Tyrannosaurus = Tyrant Lizard, Stegosaurus = Roof Lizard, etc. The “-saurus” means lizard. We do still have at least one -saurus that I know of, the “Xenosaurus” (Alien/stranger/foreigner-lizard). There are 14(?) xenosauri species in Central America, last I checked.
If it helps, you can choose to pronounce rhinocerous as “rhinosaurus”. That brings me some small comfort.
Dinosaurs don’t really have “common” names. The names you’re thinking of are the genus names (or sometimes genus + species, e.g. *Tyrannosaurus rex*).
*Saurus* appears in so many dinosaur names because it’s Greek for “lizard.” Dinosaurs aren’t lizards but they are reptiles.
There are several modern genera that do have “saurus” in their names, including [*Chlamydosaurus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilled_lizard), [*Callisaurus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra-tailed_lizard), and [*Petrosaurus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_rock_lizard). To my knowledge, all of these are proper lizards.
There’s also [*Basilosaurus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilosaurus) which is an ancient whale. It was so named because it was originally mistaken for a marine reptile, but according to the rules of scientific nomenclature the first name used becomes official.
Others have already explained, but I want to add a little fact. There’s a non-dinosaur with a saurus at the end – the basilosaur, an extinct proto-whale. Cetacean skulls look a bit reptilian, so its discoverers in the 19th century thought it was one.
Because dinosaurs and other extinct reptiles are extinct, so we don’t have a common name to refer to them, so they were referred to as their binomial name. Binomial names are scientific names that have two parts, a genus (a group of species) and its species names, and they are usually given in Latin or Latinised non Latin words.
Saurus means lizard in Latin and so is a common suffix for dinosaur names (they are usually somethinglizard in Latin/Neo-Latin), so you end up with a lot of dinosaurs that are known by their scientific name and the name just happens to contain the word lizard.
Why modern living species don’t have saurus in their names? First, for living animals we usually have a common name, that is, a name in a common language, like how the common raven is scientifically called “Corvus corax”, which means Crow crow in Latin and Greek (ravens are what English speakers call larger species of crows). Fee animals are called by their scientific name, unless they are extinct or very exotic to the speaker.
We do have living species that in their scientific name incorporate “saurus” or “saura”, for example the Mountain Horned Dragons or Pricklenape agamas from Thailand are part of the “acanthosaura” genus, or the western plated lizard, which is scientifically called “Broadleysaurus major”.
Latest Answers