Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Saurischian
/sɔːˈrɪskiən/adjective
Belonging to the dinosaur branch that kept the lizard-like pelvis, including the meat-eating theropods and the long-necked sauropods.
The Greek roots
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
ἰσχίον
ischíon
hip socket, hip bone
Literally: “lizard hip”
The story of the word
Harry Seeley cut the dinosaurs in two by the arrangement of their hip bones, saurischian against ornithischian, and the split held for well over a century. The irony is built into the names: birds descend from the lizard-hipped branch, while the bird-hipped ornithischians left no descendants at all. A 2017 proposal to redraw the whole tree was argued down within a few years.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
dinosaursauropodischiumornithischian
In a sentence
Every saurischian in the hall shares that backward-pointing pubis.
The sparrow on the skylight is a saurischian dinosaur.