Dinosaurs were the biggest reptiles in ancient times .They don't exist anymore.\
Many kids can recite an A-Z list of dinosaur names. They take special delight in defeating tongue-twisters like Carcharodontosaurus, Ekrixinatosaurus, Huehuecanauhtlus and Zuchengtyrannus.
Sir Richard Owen came up with the name dinosaur in 1841 to describe the fossils of extinct reptiles. He coined the word by combining the Greek words “deinos”, which means terrible, and “sauros”, which means lizard.
What lies behind a name
A dinosaur’s name says something about the dinosaur itself. Scientists often use Greek or Latin root words to give a name that describes the dinosaur in some way.
Dinosaurs, like all living organisms, are classified or grouped together according to similarities they share, which also indicates their ancestral relationships to one another. To do this objectively, scientists apply cladistics, a methodology that enables the assessment of relationships of organisms to one another based on shared characteristics.
According to the classification system, there are always two parts to a dinosaur’s name – or any living organism for that matter – and they should both be italicised. The first part of the name is called the genus name and the second the species name.
There can be several different species (varieties) of a particular genus of an animal. For example, humans are Homo sapiens, but in the fossil record there are several other members of the genus Homo for example Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo erectus .
Before it can become official, and to prevent duplication, once palaeontologists have chosen a new name it has to be approved by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Palaeontologists must also fully describe the anatomy of the dinosaur and explain the cladistic analyses and the derivation of the name in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Who gets to have a dinosaur named after them
Only a few palaeontologists ever have the opportunity of naming a dinosaur, and even fewer have species named after them. Paleontologists get to name a dinosaur if they, or an expedition team, finds an animal that is distinct from any others known.