The very first dinosaurs on the planet - names, a brief description and photos. From tyrex to ugrunuluk: where do dinosaur names come from? Herbivore dinosaurs and their names

How many species of dinosaurs do you know? Check out our list, which includes the most famous dinosaur species.

Here you will be provided with material about all aspects of life and the appearance of dinosaurs. The Mesozoic era will be described in great detail. Our information is collected very carefully and does not miss even a single small detail. The sources of our articles are modern domestic studies and foreign paleontological developments. Our information will be interesting to both children and adults. It will be useful not only to an ordinary amateur, but also to a scientific worker.

The majestic era in the life of our planet is that multimillion-dollar segment of history when mysterious dinosaurs lived on Earth. So let's try to solve their secrets!

Dinosaurs, who are they? Let's start by defining the view.

If we translate the Latin word "Dinosauria" from the ancient Greek language, we get the phrase "terrible pangolin." In 1842, the Englishman Richard Owen (a famous zoologist and paleontologist) introduced this term into science.

So, according to scientific classification, dinosaurs are a superorder (in a rank definition) or a wide group of land reptiles that lived on Earth in the Mesozoic era, namely 231.4 - 66.2 million years ago. These animals had a number of similar symptoms. The main one was the constitution of the body, especially the pelvic bones. Further on the site you will see a comparative diagram of the hip department of different types of land dinosaurs. Consider the left model - it demonstrates the constitution of the pelvic bones of amphibians and a large detachment of reptiles. In this model, the legs are clearly spaced on the sides and quite curved. The center model refers to dinosaurs and mammals. The model on the right refers to the Ravizukhs who became extinct in the Triassic period.

In turn, the representatives of the dinosaurs are divided into 8 orders:

ornithopods (Ornithopoda), pachycephalosaurs (Pachycephalosauria), ceratopsi (Ceratopsia), ankylosaurs (Ankylosauria), stegosaurs (Stegosauria), sauropods (Theropoda), theropods (Theropoda) and terizinosa.

The illustration shows the model of each skeleton reconstruction team created by paleontologist Scott Hartman.

We want to draw your attention to this fact: winged and marine dinosaurs do not belong to dinosaurs, they are assigned to separate orders of reptiles.

From ferocious theropods such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Spinosaurus to huge sauropods such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus.

In 1888, a man named Harry Seeley proposed classifying dinosaurs into two groups, looking at their structure of the hip joints, these groups are called Saurischia (lizard hipped) and Ornithischia (bird hipped). These two groups can be divided into subgroups, such as families, subfamilies, etc. Let's look at some of the interesting subgroups and examples of dinosaurs that are part of them.

Theropods

Theropods - Theropod name means “beast foot” which literally translates to “best foot”. This group includes all predatory (meat-eating) dinosaurs. An interesting fact is that the birds really evolved from theropods, and not from ornithish (bird) dinosaurs. Theropods moved on two legs and included some eerily looking but popular dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor.

Sauropods

Sauropods - have evolved and learned to walk on four limbs. They usually grew to huge sizes. These were herbivores (eating plants). This species included classic dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus.

Poultry Dinosaurs

Ornithischia - the name Tireofora means "carriers of the shield." This group includes armored dinosaurs such as the Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus. They were herbivores that lived throughout the Jurassic period until the late Cretaceous.

Therapies

Cerapods included many interesting groups, such as Ceratopsian (horned) dinosaurs, Triceratops, and Ornithopods (bird) dinosaurs such as Iguanodon.

It is no secret that during the existence of our planet the world of flora and fauna has changed several times. Dinosaurs did not survive to our times, but their existence is confirmed by numerous excavations.

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  Types of dinosaurs, their classification

Paleontologists claim that dinosaurs have inhabited our planet for more than a hundred million years. Scientists came to such conclusions after many years of excavation, which allowed them to invade the bowels of the earth and find numerous remains of giant birds and animals there. What reality was in those days, one can only guess.

Today we will examine in more detail what types of dinosaurs are, and what information about them is available today. In general, when you become interested in these animals, it strikes how much is known to paleontologists, and after all, no one has ever seen these animals with their own eyes. Now they are the heroes of horror films, fairy tales for children and so on, it is thanks to the artists that we have a clear idea of \u200b\u200bhow such unusual creatures actually looked. Very often, different dinosaurs are compared with dragons.

Scientists, unfortunately, have not been able to come to a single conclusion why dinosaurs suddenly became extinct on our planet. Although in that era not only dinosaurs disappeared, but also many inhabitants of the underwater world. One of the theories says that climatic conditions did not change dramatically on Earth, and dinosaurs could not live in a new environment, so they began to die one by one. The second theory (more realistic) suggests that 65 million years ago a huge asteroid crashed onto our planet, which destroyed many terrestrial creatures.

We will not go into details about why huge creatures disappeared from the face of the Earth, it will be much more interesting to talk about what paleontologists know today. And they know a lot, from the remains it was possible to establish what kind of dinosaurs existed, to report approximately how many species were, and also give them certain names.

For the first time, the English biologist Richard Owen spoke about dinosaurs, it was he who called the animals this term (by the way, the “dinosaur” from Greek translates as a terrible lizard). Until 1843, scientists did not put forward theories about the existence of dinosaurs. Their remains were attributed to either dragons or other giant mythical animals.

Now the list of species is simply huge and each genus has its own name. For example, you will be interested to know which are the two largest and most ancient groups of these animals. The names may seem ridiculous to some, but these are lizards and poultry creatures. Next, we list the most famous and in our opinion the main types or types of dinosaurs. Do not be surprised that representatives of the most famous breeds could swim, fly, and not just move on land. A lot of information was studied by scientists before they could draw conclusions that dinosaurs can be divided into such groups:

• predatory;
• herbivores;
• flying;
• water.

Paleontologists knew exactly how to distinguish one type from another, they conducted more and more research, as a result of which the world learned about trinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, pliosaurs, tyrannosaurs, ornithoheruses, and so on.

The exact number of species of existing dinosaurs cannot be established, and it is unlikely that this will ever be known. There are a lot of nuances in studying fossils. It is said that the number of varieties ranges from 250 to 550 and these numbers are constantly changing. For example, some species were identified only by excavating one tooth or vertebra. Over time, scientists realize that some species that were previously considered different can actually be attributed to the same thing. So no one is taken to draw accurate conclusions. Perhaps most types of dinosaurs exist only in the imagination of paleontologists and other lovers of sensations. But since these huge creatures disappeared from our planet, it means that it was necessary. Nothing happens by chance, and especially the extinction of real giant predators.

  Floating dinosaur: myth or reality?

Paleontologists claim that aquatic dinosaurs did exist. Honestly, the population of the seas and oceans in those days was not so harmless. Aquatic dinosaurs would love to eat everyone in a row. And they can’t even compare with the most dangerous sharks today. The size of the monsters exceeded the size of modern whales. Huge animals could happily have a bite, for example, with another dinosaur, which, by chance, was in the wrong place at that time. Some fish grew up to 25 m (for comparison, the standard nine-story building is 30 m).

Sea monsters are classified as follows:

• plesiosaurus (a long-necked creature that lived under water all the time, sometimes floated to the surface to breathe air or grab a flying bird);
• the elasmosaurus weighed about 500 kg, had a small but moving head on a huge (8 m) neck;
• mosasaurs lived in the seas and oceans, but moved a little snake-like;
• ichthyosaurs are very warlike and bloodthirsty animals that lived and hunted in packs. There were practically no insurmountable obstacles for them;
• notosaurus led a double lifestyle (on land and in water), ate small creatures and fish;
• lyopleurodons lived exclusively in the aquatic environment, could hold their breath for several hours, dive to the depths and hunt there;
• shonizaur is a completely harmless reptile, which was an excellent hunter and ate shellfish, octopuses, squids.

Very little is known about the existence of double-headed creatures, many species of dinosaurs had long claws that helped them move faster. Some types of large marine inhabitants were:

• with a collar on the neck;
• with a hood;
• with a crest on the back (sometimes with two crests);
• with spikes;
• with a crest on the head;
• with a mace on the tail.

  Herbivorous dinosaurs: their classification

This is most likely the most peaceful species of huge creatures. They quietly chewed weed, were happy and entered the battle solely for the purpose of self-defense. It is rare that herbivores attacked first. At the same time, dinosaurs of this type were not weak defenseless animals at all. A powerful skeleton, huge horns, a tail with a mace, unrealistically huge sizes, strong limbs that could immediately defeat on the spot - all these are characteristics of quite peaceful animals.

There were several types of herbivore creatures:

• stegosaurs - they had peculiar crests on the body, chewed grass, from time to time swallowed stones to improve digestion;
• euplocephalus, which was covered with spikes, bone carapace and had a mace tail. This is a truly scary monster;
• brachiosaurus - could eat about a ton of greenery in just a day;
• triceratops had beaks, horns, lived in herds, easily defended themselves from enemies;
• the hadrosaurs were large enough, but very vulnerable, still a mystery how they survived.

This is not a complete list of species of grass dinosaurs.

  Predatory dinosaurs

Still, most dinosaurs were predators by nature. They had a powerful body structure, huge teeth, horns, shells. All this allowed the animals to rise above the rest of the living creatures, often dinosaurs fought with their relatives. The strongest always won, there was no talk of any kindred ties. The tyrannosaurus was considered the most popular predator; you can find a lot of interesting information about it, watch a video. Tirex is the hero of many horror films, because this born hunter really was a scary, disgusting, ruthless, bloodthirsty.

  Dinosaur with a long neck (name and species)

Among herbivorous, marine and predatory species, there were breeds that differed in unrealistically long necks. For example, diplodocus is a herbivore creature whose neck consisted of 15 vertebrae. He could easily get branches from the tallest trees.

Flying species or dinosaur birds really were with wings, scales, sometimes even feathers. The peculiarity of these creatures was huge very sharp teeth, which can not be said about modern birds. These are pterodactyls, pterosaurs, archeopteryx. Ornithoheyrus in size was like a small plane, had a light skeleton, a crest on its beak. Such "birds" lived near large bodies of water.

Pretty informative, and also interesting to read about the inhabitants of the Jurassic period, is not it? At that time, the population of the Earth was completely different, terrible and incomprehensible to us, its modern inhabitants.

Can you imagine what dinosaurs looked like when they ruled this land many years ago? Let me answer this question. Some dinosaur species, once the largest creatures on the planet, were four-story buildings tall and weighed more than the combined weight of hundreds of cars.

Interested in? A lot of interesting facts are known about dinosaurs. As you may have guessed, it is precisely about these prehistoric reptiles that we will speak today on the site about the animal site. We will tell you what groups dinosaurs are divided into, their evolution, and also about the hypotheses why dinosaurs became extinct.

These giant creatures got their name from the Greek and Latin languages. In simple words dinosaur means "terrible lizard".

They are usually named according to their characteristics of the body, the place where they were found, or in honor of the person participating in their discovery. The name, as a rule, consists of two Greek or Latin words or their combination.

Dinosaur species. All dinosaurs were not alike. Their eating habits were different, they were of different sizes, the walking style of some was different from the others, there were many more features.

Dinosaur groups

Sauropods  - a group of herbivorous dinosaurs, which differed in the most impressive sizes among the rest - a large body, a long tail and a neck, which, like a giraffe, helped to get tree foliage for food.

Theropods  - carnivorous dinosaurs. This group of predators had excellent eyesight, sharp teeth and no less sharp claws, which helped a lot when hunting.

Large herbivorous dinosaurs with huge bone plates located along a long spine. It is believed that these spikes served not only as a deterrent for predators, visually increasing the size of the dinosaur, but also participated in the processes of thermoregulation due to the huge number of blood vessels located in them.

Brachiosaurus - huge dinosaurs that lived in herds. Their sizes can be compared with two double-decker buses, stacked on top of each other. Like all sauropods, they had a long neck, helping them to extract succulent foliage from tall trees.

Some dinosaurs preferred to move exclusively on two legs, so they were called bipedal, while others walked only on four. But there were species that could freely move on both two and four legs.

Dinosaur evolution

Dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, their ancestors are reptiles that inhabited the vast expanses of the Earth. In the process of evolution, terrestrial dinosaur species arose. Their appearance was very different from the more primitive reptiles. Even now, no one can say exactly why such changes occurred. But one thing is clear - as a result of evolution, the fittest survive. And only a small percentage falls by chance.

The first dinosaurs were small (about 10-15 feet in length) and were distinguished by a fragile physique. They moved quickly on two legs. For the first time, their remains were discovered in the last century in Madagascar, off the coast of southern Africa.

The eoraptor is one of the very first dinosaurs that appeared about 228 million years ago. It is no bigger than a dog in size, but, nevertheless, it was a predator, quickly moving on two legs.

Not all prehistoric animals were dinosaurs. In addition to them, there were many other representatives of the fauna.

Dinosaurs populated exclusively land. None of them lived in the sea or flew. True, in some carnivorous species feathers appeared over time, and they evolved into birds.

Not all dinosaurs were huge. Among them there were also small specimens. The smallest was the size of a chicken, so it was named compsognat.

Birds are the only surviving descendants of the dinosaurs. Humans themselves, as most experts suggest, have never coexisted with dinosaurs.

The number of teeth for each dinosaur species was completely different. Some did not have them at all, others had 50-60 thick teeth resembling a cone in shape. But hadrosaurs had the most teeth - about 960. An interesting fact is that if a tooth fell out or broke a tooth, then a new one always grew in its place.

Life expectancy in different species of dinosaurs was significantly different. Large species could survive up to 100 years, while in smaller dinosaurs it was significantly shorter.

Why did dinosaurs die out?

Extinction is the process of extinction of whole species of animals. This happens when the death rate exceeds the birth rate and is considered a natural result of evolution. That is, if organisms cannot adapt to the conditions of existence in the environment, they disappear.

Dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago as a result of abrupt climatic changes that occurred after the collision of a large asteroid with the Earth. This is the most popular theory explaining the death of dinosaurs.

It is believed that a large asteroid crashed into the Earth at great speed. Its dimensions were about 10 km in diameter. Because of which there was a wave of earthquakes, raising clouds of dust, which was the reason for the death of dinosaurs.

According to another theory, there was a strong cooling on Earth, and animals, without feathers or fur, could not survive in such climatic conditions.

To date, it is believed that only birds retained some of the characteristic features inherent in the distant past of dinosaurs.

Bones of fossil animals were found on every continent without exception. It is possible, it may even be somewhere near you.

Dinosaurs are a group of lizards, or reptiles, that flourished in the Mesozoic era - an era of middle life on our planet. Other reptile species lived on Earth with them - crocodile-like, flying lizards, plane-toothed and serpentine, fish-like and scaly species of lizards. The differences between the dinosaurs were so great that scientists establish their family ties with great difficulty. Dinosaurs were the size of a cat or chicken, and were the size of whales. Some moved on four legs, others ran on two. Among them were bloodthirsty killers and predators, dexterous hunters, as well as herbivorous and harmless species.

Dinosaur species

But there is one feature that unites them, they were all terrestrial animals, their paws were located at the bottom of the hull, and not on its sides like most of the current lizards. Therefore, dinosaurs can still be called running reptiles. What were the dinosaurs, is currently not known exactly. Archaeological excavations are still underway, according to the results of which, every year new and new species of dinosaurs are discovered. Over the 150 years of work of paleontologists, with the help of the remains and skeletons, about 500 species of these animals have been discovered. But in fact, more than 10,000 remains have been found. And this indicates that there could have been over 4,000 species of dinosaurs living in different eras of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

If you look at the comparative characteristics of what dinosaurs used to be, you can see the trend of their great diversity and prevalence around the globe. Dinosaurs flew, swam, crawled, they were of various sizes and bizarre shapes:

• Notosaurs and flutes looked like modern lizards with a crest, with a swimming tail flat on the sides.
• Crocodiles and mososaurs were elongated, and moved due to the twisting movements of the tail.
• Plesiosaurs, sea turtles, pliosaurs resembled a lizard with a crest, and hind limbs were used as fins.
• Fish-shaped lizards, which looked like dolphins, in their shape resembled fish, and moved in the water with the help of a tail.
• A distinctive feature of flying dinosaurs was the presence of their wings, covered with a leather membrane, like modern bats. And the fourth finger, from which the skin was stretched, was greatly lengthened.

The best of the best

Well, now let's talk about the records. Are you curious to know which is the largest dinosaur, and which is the smallest, which are predatory and which are herbivores? Records among dinosaurs will be considered below:

• The smallest dinosaur is a cosmognatus, whose length was about 70 cm and weight was about 3 kg.
• The highest dinosaur is the brachiosaurus, whose length reached 23 meters, and the weight was 30-40 tons.
• The longest dinosaur is a diplodocus, the length of which could reach 52 meters.
• The most toothy dinosaur is ornithomimid, which had about 220 sharp teeth.
• The smartest dinosaur is supposedly a troodontid, which, by the ratio of the size of the body to other dinosaurs, had the largest brain.
• The largest and heaviest dinosaur, apparently, was a titanosaurus, which lived in the Antarctic and weighed, according to some estimates, about 100 tons.

The most common types

Well, our last question regarding which species of dinosaurs were the most common, and to this day they find the largest number of their remains. These are triceratops, tyrannosaurus, pterodactyl, diplodocus.

• Triceratops is a horned, herbivorous dinosaur that lived on Earth in the Cretaceous, about 70 million years ago. On his head were three large horns, for which he received the name. He weighed about 12 tons, and was about 9 meters in length.
• Tyrannosaurus - sometimes the most famous lizard nowadays. The largest predator, whose weight reached 4 tons and a height of about 6 meters. All tyrannosaurs had powerful heads and jaws, and the length of the teeth could reach 15 centimeters!
• Pterodactyl - inhabited the Earth about 150 - 70 million years ago. The flying lizard, with a long mouth dotted with sharp teeth, mainly fed on fish and small creatures. The wingspan could reach 16 meters.
• Diplodocus is a herbivorous dinosaur that inhabited about 150 million years ago. Paleontologists found the remains of these giants in the best preserved form and therefore, almost their entire skeletons are found in museums. It is believed that this may be the longest land dinosaur, according to scientists, its length could reach 52 meters.

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Books

• Giant children's illustrated dictionary, Alekseeva Varvara Konstantinovna, Likso Vyacheslav Vladimirovich, Vaitken Lyubov Dmitrievna. Of which only encyclopedias have not been written - about technology, animals, space, great people, grandiose historical events. And much more about that! But there is a special type of universal encyclopedia, in ...
• A large children's illustrated dictionary about everything in the world, Andrei Mernikov, Vyacheslav Likso, Lyubov Dmitrievna Vaitken, Alekseeva Varvara Konstantinovna. Of which only encyclopedias have not been written - about technology, animals, space, great people, grandiose historical events. And much more about that! But there is a special type of universal encyclopedia, in ...
• A large children's illustrated dictionary about everything in the world, VK Alekseeva. No encyclopedias have been written - about technology, animals, space, great people, grandiose historical events. And much more about that! But there is a special type of universal encyclopedia, in ...