Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Titanosaur
/taɪˈtænəsɔːr/noun
Any of a group of long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs that includes the largest land animals known.
The Greek roots
Τιτάν
Titán
a Titan, elder god
σαῦρος
saûros
lizard
Literally: “Titan lizard”
The story of the word
Richard Lydekker named Titanosaurus in 1877 from Indian fossils, reaching for the Titans, the generation of gods Zeus overthrew. The group turned out to contain the heaviest animals ever to walk, Patagotitan and Argentinosaurus among them. Nothing in the Greek actually says large: Titan was a family name, and the sense of enormous is a modern loan from their reputation.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1877
Same family
titanictitaniumdinosaurtyrannosaur
In a sentence
The titanosaur cast is too long for the gallery, so its neck runs out through the doorway.