Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Hadrosaur
/ˈhædrəsɔːr/noun
Any of the duck-billed plant-eating dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, with batteries of grinding teeth and often a hollow head crest.
The Greek roots
ἁδρός
hadrós
thick, bulky
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
Literally: “bulky lizard”
The story of the word
Joseph Leidy named Hadrosaurus in 1858 from a skeleton dug out of a marl pit in Haddonfield, New Jersey, the first dinosaur anywhere reconstructed nearly complete enough to show it stood on its hind legs. The resemblance between Hadrosaurus and Haddonfield is pure accident, since ἁδρός just means thick-set. The hollow crests of later hadrosaurs are tuned tubes, and acoustic models of them produce a low foghorn note.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
dinosaurhadrontyrannosaur
In a sentence
A hadrosaur bone bed can hold thousands of individuals from a single herd.