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Saturday, October 11, 2025

Are dinosaurs terrible lizards?


	October 11, 2025

Original photo by empire331/ iStock

'Dinosaur' comes from Greek words that mean 'terrible lizard.'

The first dinosaur fossil was discovered in 1677 — not that the man who came upon it realized the magnitude of his find. The English naturalist Robert Plot thought that his discovery had belonged to a giant human, and it wasn't until 1824 that the geologist William Buckland identified the bone for what it was. It took an additional 18 years for Sir Richard Owen, the most famed paleontologist of his era, to coin the term "dinosauria" — deinos meaning "terrible" or "fearfully great" in Greek, and sauros meaning "lizard." True lizards and dinosaurs diverged from one another 270 million years ago, but the name stuck nevertheless.

Suffice to say that the schoolteacher who called a young Owen "impudent" would have been surprised by his lasting scientific contributions, which also include describing many new species and founding London's Natural History Museum. Owen later went on to feud with none other than Charles Darwin over their respective views on evolution. Owen developed his own influential theory of how animals developed, and disagreed with how Darwin interpreted it in On the Origin of Species — as well as with Darwin's entire concept of natural selection. As a result, Owen's scientific reputation has suffered, but we can still thank him for every 7-year-old's favorite word.

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		Numbers Don't Lie

Dinosaurs aren't considered extinct.

Not fully, anyway. While the vast majority of our prehistoric friends did indeed die out after an asteroid likely hit the planet about 65 million years ago, some persisted — and today we call them birds. There are 10,000 species of dinosaurs alive today, none of which is as fearsome as a Tyrannosaurus rex but all of whom are marvels of evolution. The ancestors of modern birds survived while other dinosaurs died out in part by shrinking their size and exploiting a different, less-competitive ecological niche than their bulkier, land-dwelling relatives. Between the dinosaurs of old and the birds of today was the Archaeopteryx, a "transitional fossil" with both avian and reptilian features that lived some 150 million years ago.

Today's edition of Interesting Facts was written by Michael Nordine and edited by Bess Lovejoy.