My little collection of dinoes

It is all very confusing, - a mastodont is a sort of elefant with too many tusks, and a mastodonsaurus is an enormous frog

And "-odon-" means something with teeth, saurus is Lizard, and none of them are lizards, and a frog has no teeth (?) ...

SUSANNE wrote:

It is all very confusing, - a mastodont is a sort of elefant with too many tusks, and a mastodonsaurus is an enormous frog

And "-odon-" means something with teeth, saurus is Lizard, and none of them are lizards, and a frog has no teeth (?) ...

...and the worst is that the first name is the only accepted! So, if the name doesn't make sense will continue forever!

Roger wrote:

SUSANNE wrote:

It is all very confusing, - a mastodont is a sort of elefant with too many tusks, and a mastodonsaurus is an enormous frog

And "-odon-" means something with teeth, saurus is Lizard, and none of them are lizards, and a frog has no teeth (?) ...

...and the worst is that the first name is the only accepted! So, if the name doesn't make sense will continue forever!

A frog has no teeth BUt a mastodonsaurus had a lot of teeth. It was not a frog, it was a big amphibian.. With teeth

Some animals were called saurus when they were discovered and the finder first thought they were reptiles but they were not.

It's the story of the mastodonsaurus, which was a big amphibian and of the basilosaurus which was a very big mammal

I will have to borrow more books about them

One problem is, that the books I can get at the local lib are only about dinoes

Kikimalou wrote:

[quote="
A frog has no teeth BUt a mastodonsaurus had a lot of teeth. It was not a frog, it was a big amphibian.. With teeth

Of course it is not a frog, it has a long tail and teeth, it's surely a salamander!

It is a crocofrog...bert

Kikimalou wrote:

It is a crocofrog...bert

First my gratulations on your very nice Bullyland pre-historics, this way i can't make a mistake i guess, haha...

About those names...
I know this from my tropical fish and stuff like that...
The name that was given first, is normally the name that stays, that means, the name of the species, the genus, so the name of the family can change, if there are new insights into the matter...
An example:Panthera tigris, the tiger...
Panthera is the family, tigris the species, eventually with a third name, the subspecies, so for the Siberian tiger: Panthera tigris altaica
If it is found out, that the tiger doesn't belong into this family, the first name Panthera will be changed by any scientist in an official article, but if this is accepted by the rest of the scientists is another question...
But the rest of the name stays, only possibly slightly changed to the first name, if it is female, male or neuter...
Another example for this...
I do have a fishspecies from Central-America here, that was known as Vieja synspila.
But as the family name changed into Paratheraps, the species name changed into synspilus, which fits to the first familyname...
Is it still understandable???
Anyway, there are strict regulations in naming species, and this has to make things clear, but if a name changes a lot, a lot of people get lost in the matter of course.
As i do write national- and international articles about tropical fish, i have to keep up, which is not always easy as you may understand, so how can we aspect from normal people that they understand the names of the pre-historic creatures all of the time...
But it helps if you are really interested, and when you do speak some Latin languages, like French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Romanian or Latin.
This way you can recognise lots of names by the meaning of them, like Susanne did before with donto as teeth...
But to make things more complicated, the names of species are taken from the Latin or Greek, with a lot of variations in that, so forget it, if you are not into it, because you will loose track, haha...

I did have Latin and French at school, - but that is 40 years ago

And it seems to me that many of those dinoes have greek names

So I make "idiot rules", like "Dilopia", - ear-lope.
Or Parasaurolophus, - something with a parasol on the head that is a lope, - but then I remember wrong and get Paralopusaurus... so I just call him a parasollosaurus