Lambeosaurine

Part of speech: adjective, noun

Definitions

1. Of or belonging to a subfamily of ornithopod dinosaurs characterized by elaborate hollow crests on their heads
2. Describing a member of the crested duck-billed dinosaur group that flourished during the Late Cretaceous period
3. Pertaining to hadrosaur dinosaurs with distinctive cranial crests used for communication or species recognition

Etymology: Lambeosaurine comes from the genus name Lambeosaurus, which the Canadian palaeontologist Lawrence Lambe named in 1923 in honour of himself. Lambe had earlier described a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous rocks of Alberta and named it after the pioneering Canadian paleontologist and geologist Lambe was honouring, but the name Lambeosaurus itself is the one that stuck, combining his surname with the Greek "sauros," meaning lizard. The adjective and noun "lambeosaurine" are formed by adding the suffix "-ine," used in taxonomy to mark a subfamily, to the genus name. Lambeosaurines are a group of crested hadrosaurid dinosaurs, the duck-billed herbivores whose hollow head crests were likely used for sound production or display. The term was therefore coined in modern palaeontology, not in classical antiquity, and its history is a plain one: a surname, a Greek element, and a taxonomic suffix.

Synonyms: lambeosaurid