Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Diapsid
/daɪˈæpsɪd/noun
A member of the reptile lineage with two openings behind each eye socket, including lizards, snakes, crocodiles and birds.
The Greek roots
δι-
di-
two, twice
ἁψίς
hapsís
arch, loop
Literally: “two arches”
The story of the word
Osborn named it alongside synapsid in 1903, counting the windows in the skull. Turtles wrecked the tidy scheme for a century by having none at all, until DNA placed them inside the diapsids anyway, their openings lost somewhere along the way. Birds are diapsids too, so a good half of the group is currently overhead.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1903
Same family
synapsidsynapseapseapsis
In a sentence
The two temporal openings mark the skull as diapsid at a glance.