Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Ichthyosaur
/ˈɪkθiəsɔː/noun
An extinct sea reptile shaped like a dolphin, with a long toothed snout and huge eyes.
The Greek roots
ἰχθύς
ichthýs
fish
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
Literally: “fish lizard”
The story of the word
Named for what it resembles rather than what it is. The animal is a reptile that converged on the body of a fish, down to the dorsal fin and the forked tail, and gave birth live at sea. Specimens from the Lyme Regis cliffs, many of them found and sold by Mary Anning, reached London in the 1810s, and the genus Ichthyosaurus was published in 1818. ἰχθύς also gave early Christians their fish sign, read as an acrostic on the Greek for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
dinosaurichthyologysauropodtyrannosaur
In a sentence
The ichthyosaur's eye socket is the size of a saucer.
She sold the first complete ichthyosaur skull at twelve, and got no credit for a century.