Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Sauropod
/ˈsɔrəpɑd/noun
A long-necked, four-legged plant-eating dinosaur such as Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus.
The Greek roots
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
πούς
poús
foot
Literally: “lizard foot”
The story of the word
Othniel Charles Marsh coined Sauropoda in 1878 during the bone rush in the American West, naming the group for the broad five-toed feet rather than for the necks everyone now pictures. The same σαῦρος sits inside dinosaur, which Richard Owen built in 1842 out of δεινός, terrible, and the lizard word. Neither the Greeks nor Owen had any way of knowing that the closest living relatives of these animals are birds.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
Same family
dinosaurtheropodtyrannosaurustripod
In a sentence
A sauropod trackway runs for eighty metres across the quarry floor.
The largest sauropods probably needed to eat for most of their waking hours.