
Dinosaur | Definition, Types, History, Names, & Facts ...
Oct 31, 2025 · Dinosaur, the common name given to a group of reptiles, often very large, that first appeared roughly 245 million years ago and thrived worldwide for nearly 180 million years. …
Dinosaur - Wikipedia
Dinosaurs can therefore be divided into avian dinosaurs —birds—and the extinct non-avian dinosaurs, which are all dinosaurs other than birds. Dinosaurs are varied from taxonomic, …
What Makes a Dinosaur a Dinosaur - U.S. National Park Service
Jul 8, 2022 · A more handy general definition would go something like this: Dinosaurs are extinct animals with upright limbs that lived on land during the Mesozoic Era (252 to 66 million years …
What are dinosaurs? - Natural History Museum
Dinosaurs are archosaurs, a larger group of reptiles that first appeared about 251 million years ago, near the start of the Triassic Period. Some other non-dinosaur reptiles are also …
What is a dinosaur? - Science News Explores
Mar 27, 2025 · The word “dinosaur” isn’t a catch-all term for just any scaly, prehistoric giant. “There’s kind of a misconception that any big extinct thing was a dinosaur,” Smith says. In fact, …
Dinosaurs - National Geographic Society
Scientists estimate over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed Earth. Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising …
Dinosaur Facts - American Museum of Natural History
Dinosaurs are a group of reptiles that have lived on Earth for about 245 million years. In 1842, the English naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the term Dinosauria, derived from the Greek …