Titanosaur

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A member of a diverse group of gigantic herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs from the Mesozoic era, characterized by extremely long necks and tails and massive body sizes
2. One of the largest terrestrial animals known to have existed, belonging to a family of four-legged dinosaurs with elongated necks and bodies that could reach lengths of over 100 feet
3. A colossal sauropod dinosaur from the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, distinguished by its enormous size, long neck for reaching high vegetation, and quadrupedal stance

Etymology: Titanosaur comes from "Titanosauridae," the name of the family, which was named in 1877 by the American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. He based it on "Titanosaurus," a genus that the English paleontologist Richard Lydekker had named in 1877 after a fossil found in India. Lydekker's name drew on the Titans of Greek myth, the giant children of Uranus and Gaia, who were often imagined as enormous and powerful. The "-saurus" ending comes from Greek "sauros," meaning "lizard," a standard suffix for dinosaur names since the term "dinosaur" was coined in 1842 by Richard Owen. The name is a 19th-century scientific coinage, so the ancient Greeks had no word for these animals. Its parts are "titan," meaning a giant or titan in the mythological sense, and "saur," meaning lizard. Together they describe the animals as giant lizards, which fits the sauropods of which titanosaurs are a branch.

Synonyms: sauropod, long-necked dinosaur