2798: Dinosaur Suffixes Aug 18, 2024

The typical ending of dinosaur names is -saur(us) meaning ‘lizard’, and will be the default if there is no other intention behind the name, but this is not the only ending. Usually, these will be physical descriptions using some variation on Greek or else Latin. For instance:

•-mimus (e.g. Ornithomimus; Gallimimus) means “looks like”, related to ‘mime’. Here “looks like a bird” and “looks like a chicken” respectively.

•-onychus (e.g. Deinonychus) means ‘claw’. Here it has the same prefix as ‘dino’ for “terrible claw”.

•-raptor (e.g. Oviraptor) meaning ‘thief’, related to ‘rapture’, ‘raptor’ etc.. Here meaning “egg-taker”. 

•-odon/anodon (e.g. Pteranodon) meaning “tooth/toothless” respectively, here meaning “winged toothless”. 

There are exceptions where there is use of a common ending, but the first element is not from Greek or Latin, like Utahraptor which was discovered in Utah but of course does not mean “Utah thief”. This is pretty common in modern scientific names to throw out the real system and just name after modern things, from new animals to elements on the periodic table (e.g. Einsteinium) but one of the first ever fossils discovered in 1825 was that of ‘Iguanodon’ meaning ‘tooth of an Iguana’ due to the structural similarity. These names are also not particularly rigorously scientific, with Basilosaurus not being a lizard at all, but a mammalian whale-type creature, though the name hasn’t changed.