- "The combination of such characters, some, as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among Reptiles, others borrowed, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria."
- —-Richard Owen([[|src]])
An example of a dinosaur, an Albertosaurus
The Dinosaurs, or Dinosauria, was the name of a group of archosaurian reptiles that lived from the Mid Triassic Period (230 mya) to the Late Cretaceous Period (65 mya). Dinosaurs are arguably the most famous creatures ever to live on earth, first described as a group by anatomist Sir Richard Owen during a lecture in 1841, based on three genera, Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus. Dinosaurs now includes nearly a thousand species, hundreds of taxon, and around thirty families. Dinosaurs gained a huge popularity boost in 1993, with the release of the original Jurassic Park, and subsequent sequels every four years, with the exception of the fourth movie. The only dinosaurs left alive today are their direct descendants, the birds. Crocodilians are the only sister group alive of the dinosaurs. The closest extinct group were the Pterosaurs. The word dinosaur itself derives from the Greek and means "terrible lizard". In 1993 InGen Company found some bones of dinosaurs and took DNA sample from them and recreated dinosaurs.
It is unknown if dinosaurs were cold or warm blooded, but according to the Jurassic World website InGen's dinosaur clones are both hot and cold blooded, with carnivores being warm blooded and the herbivores being cold blooded.
The term "dinosaur" is also popularly applied to many prehistoric animals that are not taxonomically classified as such, including mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, pterosaurs and synapsids such as Dimetrodon. This is frowned upon in scientific writing, but persists in the media and in everyday speech.
