Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Stegosaurus
/ˌstɛɡəˈsɔːrəs/noun
A plated, small-headed dinosaur of the Late Jurassic with spikes on its tail.
The Greek roots
στέγος
stégos
roof, covering
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
Literally: “roof lizard”
The story of the word
Marsh named it in 1877 and had the animal wrong: he pictured the flat bony plates lying over the back like roof tiles, hence roof lizard. They are now reconstructed standing upright in two staggered rows, more plausibly for display or shedding heat than for armour. The tail spikes, which really are weapons, got no share of the name; palaeontologists call them thagomizers, a term lifted from a 1982 newspaper cartoon.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1877
Same family
dinosaurplesiosaurtyrannosaurusstegodon
In a sentence
The Stegosaurus has a brain the size of a walnut and eighteen plates down its spine.