Olorotitan

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large duck-billed dinosaur genus of the hadrosaurid family that lived in what is now eastern Russia during the Late Cretaceous period
2. An extinct plant-eating hadrosaur whose fossils were found in the Russian Far East, dating from the Late Cretaceous epoch
3. A genus of herbivorous, duck-billed dinosaur known from Late Cretaceous remains discovered in the Amur region of Russia

Etymology: Olorotitan is a dinosaur, a hadrosaurid ("duck-billed") from the Late Cretaceous of eastern Russia, named in 2009 by the palaeontologists Pascal Godefroit and colleagues. The name's first element, "olor," is Latin for "swan," and the second, "titan," refers to the giant mythological Titans of Greek myth. The combined sense is roughly "swan titan," a nod to the animal's large size and to the swan-like long neck the fossil material suggested. The name follows the standard pattern of scientific coinages, which are built from Latin and Greek roots rather than inherited from ancient speakers. Palaeontologists often choose descriptive or allusive elements in this way, so the word as a whole was made in the twenty-first century rather than in antiquity. "Titan" entered English long before that, through Latin "Titan" from Greek "Titān," but the compound itself is modern.