I'm messing mate - they're a bit of a hodge-podge of Greek and Latin but on the whole it's mostly Greek that's used. IIRC - from the dawn of my BSc. pre-history - it's because living and recently (in relative terms) extinct creatures are named binomially (ie. in Latin, genus then species - eg. Homo Sapiens) but because dinosaurs are so archaic and have so many missing links it's hard to do it this way for them so Greek's used to illustrate their properties as opposed to their full scientific names, eg. pachycephalosaurus - pachy (thick) cephalo (head) saurus (lizard).Lawger wrote:Really? Didn't know that, thanks. I assumed it was in latin partly because almost all existing species are named in latin. And I know the "rex" from Tyrannosaurus Rex is latin. But on thinking about it the names don't really look or sound very latin.Eggenberg wrote:For the record dinosaur names are Greek...... and yes, I'm pedanticosaurus
I love absolutely useless information