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Dinosaurs

dinosaurs to scale A selection of dinosaurs grouped by the geologic interval

in which they lived.
dinosaur
fossil reptile
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Also known as: Dinosauria

Written by

John H. Ostrom,

Kevin Padian•All
Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Apr 30, 2025 • Article History
Table of Contents
Key People: Barnum Brown Earl Douglass Edwin H. Colbert Paul
Sereno Richard Owen
Related
Topics: saurischian ornithischian cerapod Thyreophora Sauropodomorpha
See all related content
Top Questions
What are dinosaurs?

How did most dinosaurs go extinct?

Did dinosaurs have feathers?

News • Bird beaks aren't random - they follow a hidden pattern • Apr. 30,
2025, 4:56 AM ET (Earth.com) ...(Show more)

dinosaur, (clade Dinosauria), the common name given to a

group of reptiles, often very large, that first appeared
roughly 245 million years ago (near the beginning of the
Middle Triassic Epoch) and thrived worldwide for nearly
180 million years. Most died out by the end of
the Cretaceous Period, about 66 million years ago, but many
lines of evidence now show that one lineage evolved
into birds about 155 million years ago.

(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)

How well do you know dinosaurs?
Find out by taking our Name that Dinosaur photo quiz.
The name dinosaur comes from the Greek
words deinos (“terrible” or “fearfully great”)
and sauros (“reptile” or “lizard”). The English
anatomist Richard Owen proposed the formal term
Dinosauria in 1842 to include three giant extinct animals
(Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus)
represented by large fossilized bones that had been
unearthed at several locations in southern England during
the early part of the 19th century. Owen recognized that
these reptiles were far different from other known reptiles of
the present and the past for three reasons: they were large
yet obviously terrestrial, unlike the
aquatic ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that were already
known; they had five vertebrae in their hips, whereas most
known reptiles have only two; and, rather than holding their
limbs sprawled out to the side in the manner of lizards,
dinosaurs held their limbs under the body in columnar
fashion, like elephants and other large mammals.
1 of 3

dinosaur phylogeny

2 of 3
Find out whether dinosaurs really had feathersLearn more about what
kinds of dinosaurs may have had feathers and when.
(more)
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3 of 3
How were dinosaurs discovered?Learn about the history of people
discovering fossils and the coining of the term dinosaur.
(more)
See all videos for this article
Originally applied to just a handful of incomplete
specimens, the clade Dinosauria now encompasses more
than 800 generic names and at least 1,000 species, with new
names being added to the roster every year as the result of
scientific explorations around the world. Not all of these
names are valid taxa, however. A great many of them have
been based on fragmentary or incomplete material that may
actually have come from two or more different dinosaurs. In
addition, bones have sometimes been misidentified as
dinosaurian when they are not from dinosaurs at all.
Nevertheless, dinosaurs are well documented by
abundant fossil remains recovered from
every continent on Earth, and the number of known
dinosaurian taxa is estimated to be 10–25 percent of actual
past diversity.

1 of 3
Archaeopteryx: The holy grail of fossilsArchaeopteryx is the earliest
known dinosaur that's also a bird.See all videos for this article

2 of 3
Dinosaur National MonumentScientists excavating dinosaur fossils from a
quarry wall in Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado.
(more)

3 of 3

fossilFossil of a dinosaur in the Lufengosaurus genus lying where it was

unearthed in Yunnan province, China.

The extensive fossil record of genera and species is

testimony that dinosaurs were diverse animals, with widely
varying lifestyles and adaptations. Their remains are found
in sedimentary rock layers (strata) dating to the Late
Triassic Epoch (approximately 237 million to 201.3 million
years ago). The abundance of their fossilized bones
is substantive proof that dinosaurs were the dominant form
of terrestrial animal life during the Mesozoic Era (about
252.2 million to 66 million years ago). It is likely that the
known remains represent a very small fraction (probably
less than 0.0001 percent) of all the individual dinosaurs that
once lived.

Britannica Quiz
Deadliest Animals Quiz
 The search for dinosaurs

The rst nds

Learn about the discovery of dinosaur “Sue” and the competition

between collectorsA discussion of the competition among collectors and
museums for dinosaur bones, including those of Sue, from the
documentary The Dinosaur Wars.
(more)
See all videos for this article
Before Richard Owen introduced the term Dinosauria in
1842, there was no concept of anything even like a dinosaur.
Large fossilized bones quite probably had been observed
long before that time, but there is little record—and no
existing specimens—of such findings much before 1818. In
any case, people could not have been expected to
understand what dinosaurs were even if they found their
remains. For example, some classical scholars now conclude
that the Greco-Roman legends of griffins from the 7th
century BCE were inspired by discoveries
of protoceratopsian dinosaurs in the Altai region
of Mongolia. In 1676 Robert Plot of the University of
Oxford included, in a work of natural history, a drawing of
what was apparently the knee-end of the thighbone of a
dinosaur, which he thought might have come from an
elephant taken to Britain in Roman times. Fossil bones of
what were undoubtedly dinosaurs were discovered in New
Jersey in the late 1700s and were probably discussed at the
meetings of the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia. Soon thereafter, Lewis and Clark’s
expedition encountered dinosaur fossils in the
western United States.
fi
fi
The earliest verifiable published record of dinosaur remains
that still exists is a note in the 1820 American Journal of
Science and Arts by Nathan Smith. The bones described had
been found in 1818 by Solomon Ellsworth, Jr., while he was
digging a well at his homestead in Windsor, Connecticut. At
the time, the bones were thought to be human, but much
later they were identified as Anchisaurus. Even earlier
(1800), large birdlike footprints had been noticed on
sandstone slabs in Massachusetts. Pliny Moody, who
discovered these tracks, attributed them to “Noah’s raven,”
and Edward Hitchcock of Amherst College, who began
collecting them in 1835, considered them to be those of
some giant extinct bird. The tracks are now recognized as
having been made by several different kinds of dinosaurs,
and such tracks are still commonplace in the Connecticut
River valley today.

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Better known are the finds in southern England during the

early 1820s by William Buckland (a clergyman) and Gideon
Mantell (a physician), who
described Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, respectively. In
1824 Buckland published a description of Megalosaurus,
fossils of which consisted mainly of a lower jawbone with a
few teeth. The following year Mantell published his “Notice
on the Iguanodon, a Newly Discovered Fossil Reptile, from
the Sandstone of Tilgate Forest, in Sussex,” on the basis of
several teeth and some leg bones. Both men collected fossils
as an avocation and are credited with the earliest published
announcements in England of what later would be
recognized as dinosaurs. In both cases their finds were too
fragmentary to permit a clear image of either animal. In
1834 a partial skeleton was found near Brighton that
corresponded with Mantell’s fragments from Tilgate Forest.
It became known as the Maidstone Iguanodon, after the
village where it was discovered. The Maidstone skeleton
provided the first glimpse of what these creatures might
have looked like.

1 of 2
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2 of 2

PlateosaurusPlateosaurus, late Triassic dinosaur. A large herbivore, it may

have reared up on its back legs and craned its long neck to browse on
vegetation high above the ground.
(more)

Two years before the Maidstone Iguanodon came to light, a

different kind of skeleton was found in the Weald of
southern England. It was described and
named Hylaeosaurus by Mantell in 1832 and later proved to
be one of the armoured dinosaurs. Other fossil bones began
turning up in Europe: fragments described and named
as Thecodontosaurus and Palaeosaurus by two English
students, Henry Riley and Samuel Stutchbury, and the first
of many skeletons named Plateosaurus by the naturalist
Hermann von Meyer in 1837. Richard Owen identified two
additional dinosaurs, albeit from fragmentary
evidence: Cladeiodon, which was based on a single large
tooth, and Cetiosaurus, which he named from an incomplete
skeleton composed of very large bones. Having carefully
studied most of these fossil specimens, Owen recognized
that all of these bones represented a group of large reptiles
that were unlike any living varieties. In a report to the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841,
he described these animals, and the word Dinosauria was
first published in the association’s proceedings in 1842.

Reconstruction and classi cation

IguanodonIguanodon, an early Cretaceous dinosaur, was a massive

herbivore with a horny beak and cheek teeth for grinding vegetation. Its
hands had distinctive hoofed fingers and spiked thumbs.
(more)
During the decades that followed Owen’s announcement,
many other kinds of dinosaurs were discovered and named
in England and Europe: Massospondylus in
fi
1854, Scelidosaurus in 1859, Bothriospondylus in 1875,
and Omosaurus in 1877. Popular fascination with
the giant reptiles grew, reaching a peak in the 1850s with the
first attempts to reconstruct the three animals on which
Owen based Dinosauria—Iguanodon, Megalosaurus,
and Hylaeosaurus—for the first world exposition, the Great
Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace. A sculptor
under Owen’s direction (Waterhouse Hawkins) created life-
size models of these two genera, and in 1854 they were
displayed together with models of other extinct and living
reptiles, such as plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and crocodiles.

By the 1850s it had become evident that the reptile fauna of

the Mesozoic Era was far more diverse and complex than it
is today. The first important attempt to establish an
informative classification of the dinosaurs was made by the
English biologist T.H. Huxley as early as 1868. Because he
observed that these animals had legs similar to birds as well
as other birdlike features, he established a new order called
Ornithoscelida. He divided the order into two suborders.
Dinosauria was the first and included the iguanodonts, the
large carnivores (or megalosaurids), and the armoured
forms (including Scelidosaurus). Compsognatha was the
second order, named for the very small
birdlike carnivore Compsognathus.
CompsognathusCompsognathus, late Jurassic dinosaur. It was a swift and
agile predator and one of the smallest known dinosaurs.
(more)
Huxley’s classification was replaced by a radically new
scheme proposed in 1887 by his fellow Englishman H.G.
Seeley, who noticed that all dinosaurs possessed one of two
distinctive pelvic designs, one like that of birds and the other
like that of reptiles. Accordingly, he divided the dinosaurs
into the orders Ornithischia (having a birdlike pelvis)
and Saurischia (having a reptilian pelvis). Ornithischia
included four suborders: Ornithopoda (Iguanodon and
similar herbivores), Stegosauria (plated
forms), Ankylosauria (Hylaeosaurus and other armoured
forms), and Ceratopsia (horned dinosaurs, just then being
discovered in North America). Seeley’s second order,
the Saurischia, included all the carnivorous dinosaurs, such
as Megalosaurus and Compsognathus, as well as the giant
herbivorous sauropods, including Cetiosaurus and several
immense “brontosaur” types that were turning up in North
America. In erecting Saurischia and Ornithischia, Seeley
cast doubt on the idea that Dinosauria was a natural
grouping of these animals. This uncertainty persisted for a
century thereafter, but it is now understood that the two
groups share unique features that indeed make the
Dinosauria a natural group.

Discover the differences between Louis Dollo's former reconstruction

and David Norman's current reconstruction of IguanodonFormer
reconstruction of Iguanodon by Louis Dollo (1870s), followed by current
reconstruction with locomotion by David Norman (1980).
(more)
See all videos for this article
In 1878 a spectacular discovery was made in the town of
Bernissart, Belgium, where several dozen
complete articulated skeletons of Iguanodon were
accidentally uncovered in a coal mine during the course of
mining operations. Under the direction of the Royal
Institute of Natural Science of Belgium, thousands of bones
were retrieved and carefully restored over a period of many
years. The first skeleton was placed on exhibit in 1883, and
today the public can view an impressive herd of Iguanodon.
The discovery of these multiple remains gave the first hint
that at least some dinosaurs may have traveled in groups
and showed clearly that some dinosaurs were bipedal
(walking on two legs). The supervisor of this extraordinary
project was Louis Dollo, a zoologist who was to spend most
of his life studying Iguanodon, working out its structure,
and speculating on its living habits.f

American hunting expeditions

TroodonTroodon, late Cretaceous dinosaur. This birdlike predator had large
keen eyes, binocular vision, and a relatively large brain.
(more)
England and Europe produced most of the early discoveries
and students of dinosaurs, but North America soon began to
contribute a large share of both. One leading student of
fossils was Joseph Leidy of the Academy of Natural Sciences
in Philadelphia, who named some of the earliest dinosaurs
found in America,
including Palaeoscincus, Trachodon, Troodon,
and Deinodon. Unfortunately, some names given by Leidy
are no longer used, because they were based on such
fragmentary and undiagnostic material. Leidy is perhaps
best known for his study and description of the first
dinosaur skeleton to be recognized in North America, that of
a duckbill, or hadrosaur, found at Haddonfield, New Jersey,
in 1858, which he named Hadrosaurus foulkii.
Leidy’s inference that this animal was probably amphibious
influenced views of dinosaur life for the next century.
Two Americans whose work during the second half of the
19th century had worldwide impact on
the science of paleontology in general, and the growing
knowledge of dinosaurs in particular, were O.C.
Marsh of Yale College and E.D. Cope of Haverford College,
the University of Pennsylvania, and the Academy of Natural
Sciences in Philadelphia. All previous dinosaur remains had
been discovered by accident in well-populated regions with
temperate, moist climates, but Cope and Marsh astutely
focused their attention on the wide arid expanses of bare
exposed rock in western North America. In their intense
quest to find and name new dinosaurs, these scientific
pioneers became fierce and unfriendly rivals.

Marsh’s field parties explored widely, exploiting dozens of

now famous areas, among them Yale’s sites at Morrison
and Canon City, Colorado, and, most important, Como Bluff
in southeastern Wyoming. The discovery of Como Bluff in
1877 was a momentous event in the history of paleontology
that generated a burst of exploration and study as well as
widespread public enthusiasm for dinosaurs. Como Bluff
brought to light one of the greatest assemblages of
dinosaurs, both small and gigantic, ever found. For decades
the site went on producing the first known specimens of
Late Jurassic Epoch (163.5 million to 145 million years ago)
dinosaurs such
as Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, Camarasaurus, Laosaurus,
Coelurus, and others. From the Morrison site came the
original specimens
of Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Atlantosaurus,
and Brontosaurus (later renamed Apatosaurus). Canon City
provided bones of a host of dinosaurs,
including Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus,
and Camptosaurus.
Another major historic site was the Lance Creek area of
northeastern Wyoming, where J.B. Hatcher discovered and
collected dozens of Late Cretaceous horned dinosaur
remains for Marsh and for Yale College, among them the
first specimens of Triceratops and Torosaurus. Marsh was
aided in his work at these and other localities by the skills
and efforts of many other collaborators like Hatcher—
William Reed, Benjamin Mudge, Arthur Lakes, William
Phelps, and Samuel Wendell Williston, to name a few.
Marsh’s specimens now form the core of the Mesozoic
collections at the National Museum of Natural History of
the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum of
Natural History at Yale University.

CoelophysisCoelophysis, a late Triassic dinosaur, was among the earliest

dinosaurs in North America. This predator lived in large herds and, similar to
birds, had hollow limbs.
(more)
Cope’s dinosaur explorations ranged as far as, or farther
than, Marsh’s, and his interests encompassed a wider variety
of fossils. Owing to a number of circumstances, however,
Cope’s dinosaur discoveries were fewer and his collections
far less complete than those of Marsh. Perhaps his most
notable achievement was finding and proposing the names
for Coelophysis and Monoclonius. Cope’s dinosaur
explorations began in the eastern badlands of Montana,
where he discovered Monoclonius in the Judith River
Formation of the Late Cretaceous Epoch (100.5 million to 66
million years ago). Accompanying him there was a talented
young assistant, Charles H. Sternberg. Later Sternberg and
his three sons went on to recover countless dinosaur
skeletons from the Oldman and Edmonton formations of the
Late Cretaceous along the Red Deer River of Alberta,
Canada.