Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Pterosaur
/ˈtɛrəsɔːr/noun
Any of the extinct flying reptiles of the Mesozoic.
The Greek roots
πτερόν
pterón
wing
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
Literally: “wing lizard”
The story of the word
Wing lizard, though they were not lizards and sit closer to dinosaurs and birds than to anything now alive. Each wing was a single membrane stretched from an enormously long fourth finger back to the ankle, quite unlike a bat's spread of four. Kaup grouped them as Pterosauria in 1834, and the largest of them, Quetzalcoatlus, stood about as tall as a giraffe.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
pterodactylpteranodondinosaurhelicopter
In a sentence
The quarry has yielded three pterosaur specimens in a decade.