Random Dinosaur Generator

What the dinosaur generator does

You need a dinosaur. For a class, for a story, for a kid who has already worked through the seven everybody knows and wants a new one, or for a quiz where you would rather not ask about the tyrannosaurus again.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and most of them will be names you have never said out loud, which is the good part, because there were an awful lot more than seven.

What follows is the strange bit. The names are the least reliable thing about these animals. Some of them are wrong, some of them are the same animal three times, one of them died and came back, and a few of the most famous ones were never dinosaurs at all.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a subject, twenty to find out how few you recognise.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

The man who named them got it wrong

The word is only about 180 years old. Richard Owen coined Dinosauria in 1842, from the Greek. Deinos and sauros. Terrible lizard.

They were not lizards.

They are not especially closely related to lizards either. Birds and crocodiles are both nearer to a tyrannosaurus than a lizard is. Owen was working from a handful of bones and he made a reasonable guess with the evidence in front of him, and the guess is now welded to the front of an entire branch of the tree of life and will never come off.

The terrible half held up better. Owen meant it closer to fearfully great than to horrible, which is a better word than we ended up with.

Keep that in mind as you read down a batch of these names, because almost all of them are somebody's first impression, made fast, from a fragment, and then set in stone. Ouranosaurus, brave lizard. Gasosaurus, named partly for the gas company that found it. Dracorex hogwartsia, which we will get to, and which is not a joke, and is also not real.

The flying ones were never dinosaurs

This is the one almost everybody has wrong, and it is not your fault, because every dinosaur book you have ever opened has them in it.

Pteranodon. Pterodactylus. Dimorphodon. None of them is a dinosaur.

They are pterosaurs, which is a separate group. Related, sitting on a nearby branch, alive at the same time, extinct at the same time, and no more a dinosaur than you are a chimpanzee. Same for the sea ones, the plesiosaurs and the mosasaurs and the ichthyosaurs. Not dinosaurs. Not close.

So why is the pterodactyl in the dinosaur section of every museum shop on earth?

Because the word has two jobs. In science, dinosaur means a specific branch of the family tree, defined by where the hip socket is and how the legs attach underneath the body rather than sprawling out sideways. That is the definition, and it is narrow, and pterosaurs fail it.

In every other context, dinosaur means enormous extinct thing from before people. That is what the word does in a sentence, at a museum, in a shop, and in a six year old's head. And that meaning is not wrong. It is just a different word wearing the same letters.

Both are on this list, because both are what people come looking for. Now you know which is which, which is more than most of the internet can say.

Three names, one animal

Pull enough and you will eventually get Dracorex, Stygimoloch and Pachycephalosaurus.

Those might be one animal. At three ages.

All three are bone headed dinosaurs. All three come out of the same rock, the Hell Creek Formation, from the same time and the same place. They look wildly different. Dracorex has a flat, spiky, dragonish skull. Stygimoloch has a small dome and long horns. Pachycephalosaurus has the big thick bowling ball dome everyone pictures.

In 2009 Jack Horner and Mark Goodwin cut the skulls open and looked at the bone itself. Every Dracorex skull was juvenile bone. Every Stygimoloch skull was subadult. Every Pachycephalosaurus skull was an adult. Nobody had ever found a grown up Dracorex, and nobody had ever found a baby Pachycephalosaurus.

Their conclusion was that you are looking at one animal growing up. The spikes get absorbed, the dome inflates, and the head remodels itself so drastically that three generations of palaeontologists filed the results as three separate creatures.

The bit that hurts is Dracorex. Its full name is Dracorex hogwartsia. It was found in South Dakota, and a group of children visiting the museum in Indianapolis got to name it, and they named it dragon king of Hogwarts. It is the best name in palaeontology.

And it is probably a teenager.

Horner's idea has held up for fifteen years and keeps getting more support, including a baby skull found later that ties the whole growth series together. The same argument is running right now over Triceratops and Torosaurus, and that one is still a fight, which is worth saying. Some of this is settled and some of it is not, and the honest list tells you which.

The dinosaur that was dead for 112 years

Brontosaurus is on this list, and for most of the last century putting it there would have got you corrected by any eleven year old with a library card.

Here is the sequence. Othniel Marsh named Brontosaurus in 1879. In 1903 Elmer Riggs looked at the bones again and decided it was just an Apatosaurus, which had been named two years earlier. Older name wins. That is the rule. Brontosaurus was struck off.

Except nobody told the public, and the name was too good to die. It stayed on museum signs, in books, on lunchboxes and in cartoons for another century, while every palaeontologist alive quietly winced.

Then in 2015 Emanuel Tschopp and two colleagues published a phylogenetic analysis so large it took five years, going specimen by specimen through nearly every diplodocid ever dug up. And the numbers said the original Brontosaurus material is different enough from Apatosaurus to stand on its own after all.

Brontosaurus was wrong for 112 years and then it was not.

Not everyone accepts it and the argument continues, which is the correct ending. But sit with what happened. The public was told it was wrong, kept saying it anyway out of pure stubbornness, and was eventually handed a partial vindication by better maths. That has never happened before and it will probably never happen again.

Where these come from

The names here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is all of it, and it runs on your own device.

You have eaten one

Everything above makes it sound like this is a list of things that are gone. It mostly is. One branch is not.

Birds are dinosaurs. Not descended from dinosaurs, in the loose way people say we are descended from apes. They are dinosaurs, in the same way you are a mammal. A sparrow sits inside the theropod branch, next to velociraptor, closer to a tyrannosaurus than a tyrannosaurus is to a stegosaurus.

Archaeopteryx is on this list and that is the fossil that started the argument in 1861, two years after Darwin, with feathers pressed into limestone and teeth in its mouth.

So the extinction was not total. It took the big ones and left one twig, and that twig radiated into roughly eleven thousand species that are outside your window right now.

Which means the honest version of that famous line is not that the dinosaurs died out. It is that most of them did, and the survivors got small, got feathers, and got everywhere. There is one on a wire. You have eaten one. You probably had it with rice.

Questions people ask

Was Velociraptor really like the film?

No, and the gap is enormous. The real animal was about the size of a turkey, came from Mongolia, and was covered in feathers. We know about the feathers because the forearm bones carry quill knobs, the same anchor points a modern bird has. The film's raptors are much closer to Deinonychus, which is also on this list and is roughly the right size. Crichton was following a taxonomy that had lumped the two together, kept the better sounding name, and the better sounding name won. It usually does.

Did T. rex have feathers?

Somewhere in its family, definitely. Yutyrannus is on this list and is a nine metre tyrannosaur found with feathers preserved, so the group had them. Whether an adult tyrannosaurus itself kept them is genuinely unsettled. Skin impressions show scales in places, and one live possibility is that it hatched fluffy and lost most of it growing up, the way an elephant is hairier as a calf. Anyone who tells you this is settled is ahead of the evidence.

How many kinds were there?

Somewhere over a thousand named so far, and roughly fifty new ones get named every year, which is about one a week. Most of them you will never hear of because they are known from a hip and a tooth. The seven everybody can name are famous for being big, being American, and being dug up early, which is a filter on the museums, not on the animals.

How do I say these?

However you like, and this is not a dodge. There is no official pronunciation. These are Latinised Greek assembled by scientists from a dozen countries, and palaeontologists themselves disagree in conference rooms. Break it into pieces, say each one, do not apologise. A child correcting your pronunciation of Parasaurolophus is a child having a good day, and you should let them.

Can I use this for a school project?

That is a lot of why it is here. Pull one nobody has heard of and you have already got a better project than the tyrannosaurus, because you will have to find real sources instead of copying the first page. Start with the year it was named and the country it came from. Those two facts open everything else.

References

1. Tschopp, E., Mateus, O. and Benson, R. B. J. (2015). A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). PeerJ, 3, e857. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.857
2. Horner, J. R. and Goodwin, M. B. (2009). Extreme cranial ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus. PLoS ONE, 4(10), e7626. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007626
3. Scannella, J. B. and Horner, J. R. (2010). Torosaurus Marsh, 1891, is Triceratops Marsh, 1889 (Ceratopsidae: Chasmosaurinae): synonymy through ontogeny. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(4), 1157 to 1168. https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632
4. Longrich, N. R. and Field, D. J. (2012). Torosaurus is not Triceratops: ontogeny in chasmosaurine ceratopsids as a case study in dinosaur taxonomy. PLoS ONE, 7(2), e32623. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032623
5. Owen, R. (1842). Report on British Fossil Reptiles, Part II. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 11, 60 to 204. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/95647