The origin of the name dinosaur

In fact, humans have discovered dinosaur fossils for a long time. Long before the Mantels discovered the Iguanodon, Europeans had long known that there were many bizarre and huge skeleton fossils buried underground. However, at that time, people did not know their exact ownership, so they were always mistakenly regarded as "the remains of giants". As for us Chinese, we began to collect large ancient animal fossils unearthed from the ground for medicine more than 2,000 years ago, and called these fossils "dragon bones." Who can be sure that the name "dragon bone" has no connection with the discovery of dinosaur fossils?

Psittacosaurus

However, it was not until the Mantells discovered Iguanodon and compared it with an iguana that the scientific community initially determined that it was a long-extinct reptile similar to a lizard. Therefore, the names of new types of dinosaurs and other ancient reptiles discovered subsequently were all related to lizards, such as "whale-like lizards", "forest lizards" and so on. At the same time, because these ancient animal fossils that first attracted people's attention are often huge and grotesque, they are really scary.

As the fossils of these terrifying and lizard-like ancient animals continue to be discovered and excavated, more and more types of them have accumulated, and many naturalists have begun to realize that they should be their own entity in animal taxonomy. In 1842, the British paleontologist Sir Owen created a name for them in Latin. This Latin word consists of two roots. The former root means "terrible" and the latter root means "lizard". Since then, "terrible lizards" have become a collective name for this large group of reptiles that are related to each other, but behave in a variety of ways. We Chinese have both imagination and generalization ability, so we translated this Latin name into "dinosaur".

Mamenchisaurus

Now we know that there are indeed many terrifying giants in the dinosaur family, but there are also some small and cute "little things". If you go to the Chinese Palaeozoology Hall not far to the west of the Beijing Zoo, you will see a variety of dinosaurs of different sizes and shapes, from Psittacosaurus, which is less than 1 meter long, to Mamenchisaurus, which is 22 meters long. It will give you a more comprehensive understanding of the dinosaur world.

Now we also know that dinosaurs were not lizards at all. Although they are all reptiles, in the large and complex reptile family, the genetic relationship between dinosaurs and lizards is quite far apart!

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