Hypacrosaurus

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large plant-eating dinosaur of the hadrosaur family, known from Late Cretaceous fossils found in North America, with a distinctive crest on its head
2. An extinct duck-billed reptile from the Late Cretaceous period whose fossil remains have been unearthed in western North America
3. A genus of herbivorous hadrosaurid dinosaurs that roamed North America during the Late Cretaceous and is recognized by its tall, hollow head crest

Etymology: Hypacrosaurus was named in 1913 by the American paleontologist Barnum Brown, who found its fossils in Alberta, Canada. The name is a coinage built from Greek roots: "hypakros" meaning "high" or "highest" (in the sense of a ridge or summit), and "sauros" meaning "lizard." Brown's choice refers to the dinosaur's tall, hollow crest, which rises above the skull, and the name translates loosely as "high-crested lizard." The "-saurus" ending is shared by many dinosaur names, since paleontologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries routinely borrowed Greek words for "lizard" when naming newly discovered reptiles. Hypacrosaurus is therefore a modern scientific coinage, not an ancient term, and it belongs to a family of names made from classical roots rather than from any ancient description of the animal.