Order of Reptile popular with the under five crowd.

Term invented by Sir Richard Owen in 1842 to describe the "fearfully great lizards" (Greek- Deinos, "that which inspires fear and awe," and Sauros, "lizard") discovered in Europe, specifically the Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus. Today, mostly used to describe extinct, non-avian members of Dinosauria, which were the dominant fauna of Jurassic and Cretaceous eras (often erroneously including the contemporaneous pleisosaurs, icthyosaurs, and pterosaurs).

The first dinosaurs appeared in the Triassic, about 230 million years ago.

my response to another writeup
Webster 1913 is a little out-of-date about the "written also" stuff - it isn't valid that way any more.

movie
Dinosaur is also the name of a movie by Disney. The release date was around spring 2000 (spring in the Northern hemisphere). From looking at the preview, the computer graphics are amazing. The vegetation, water, and some animals are almost perfect.

Without giving away the ending (not that kids movies usually have unexpected endings):
The movie start with (and preview consists of) a lone dinosaur egg being moved to a an island inhabited by mammals. The egg hatches, and a group of monkeys (or monkeys' ancestors) raise him. (All within about 10 minutes; dinosaurs sure grow quickly.) Then, one night, a "small" meteor hits and wipes out life on the island. Of course, our dino and immediate adopted family escape... escape to be almost eaten by {a group of small predetor dinos}. Just when they're about to become dinner, a herd of (bigger) migrating dinosaurs scare away the small pests. (Nevermind that there are about 5 of each time of dino in the group.) {main dino's name}, our lucky egg, joins the group and finds a girl ... who happens to be the sister of the leader of entire herd. The leader becomes a foil for {name}, and ignores {names}'s suggestions whenever possible. (more...)

A dismissive and derogatory term for an outmoded or irrelevant person or institution.

Though of uncertain origin, this particular usage first became widespread in England in the popular music press during the heyday of Punk Rock, around 1976-77. The two main weekly popular music tabloids at the time, 'New Musical Express' (aka NME) and 'Melody Maker', denounced as a dinosaur practically every performer who was popular before 1976. The expression was quickly taken up by the media in general, and its meaning widened to include anyone or anything that was deemed to be out of date.

It is somewhat ironic that Mark Knopfler, who as the leader of stadium rock band 'Dire Straits' was among the many artist dismissed as a dinosaur, now has an actual dinosaur named after him (Masiakasaurus knopfleri). I suppose it would have been rather more ironic if John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) had one named after him though (Masiakasaurus rotteni?).

Dinosaur Genera

This is as complete a list as I've been able to produce of all currently known dinosaur genera - including their pterosaur and lagosuchian relatives - organised alphabetically and linked to respective nodes.

Within each genera there may be dozens of species, and the page for each genus will in turn link to each of these (for example, the Tyrannosaurus entry will link to Tyrannosaurus rex and Tyrannosaurus bataar).

Please /msg me if you discover any mistakes or omissions & I'll correct them.

Editor's note, 2004-01-06: This metanode was originally created by memebomb. After having the staff maintain it for two years we've moved it to a generic account.

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Thanks to the Dinosauricon (www.dinosauricon.com) for helping me fill in some of the gaps in this list)

A group of extinct reptiles in the clade archosauria (which also includes their ancestors, thecodonts, their progeny, birds, and crocodilians).

For a long time, the term dinosauria ("terrible lizards") was considered informal, and at best suitable only for children's books and Ray Harryhausen movies. Now it is recognized that dinosauria is a legitimate classification –– a group of animals characterized by an elongate ilium and a perforate acetabulum.

The ilium is the top bone in the hip. In dinosaurs, this bone was elongated from front to back. The acetabulum is the hip socket. If you were to stick your finger into a human acetabulum, you would hit the back of the socket. But with dinosaurs, the acetabulum is "perforate." In other words, there is no back to it. You can stick your finger right through. However, I'm not so sure that your local dinosaur would be very happy if you did this.

dink = D = dinosaur pen

dinosaur n.

1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1988 Unix EXPO, Bill Joy compared the liquid-cooled mainframe in the massive IBM display with a grazing dinosaur "with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it". IBM was not amused. Compare big iron; see also mainframe. 2. [IBM] A very conservative user; a zipperhead.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Genre: Animation, Children.
Directors: Eric Leighton, Ralph Zondag.
Writers: Walon Green, Thom Enriquez.
Voices: D.B. Sweeney, Joan Plowright, Ossie Davis, Della Reese.
Run time: 82 minutes.
Web site: http://www.DisneyDinosaur.com

The truth must be said, that this is a children movie. Yet, you don't have to be a child in your heart or a pedophile in order to watch it. Either you are facing the unfortunate task of entertaining your offsprings, or, you are just a moderately normal, more than slightly techie person, and you are into fancy animation and computer generated graphics, the likes of which are featured in 'Dinosaur'.

Dinosaur is a kind of pre-historic Lion King, also by Disney.
Here the hero, an Iguanodon dinosaur, named Aladar, also does not grow among his own kind, but by a group of Lemurs (small ancient primates which still exist today). A meteorite shower forces him to abandon his beloved home. During his flight from the terrors of the heavens, he meets a herd of dinosaurs on their way to the dinosaur paradise, the mating grounds. The herd is lead by a big vicious dinosaur, who prefers to leave behind the weak and helpless for the benefit of the rest of the herd. As in The Lion King, Aladar confronts the violent, evil Fascist leader, while doing his best to help the old and weak (How very not Axis of Evil of him).

Dinosaur was built as a mixture of the usual children-nature-journey movies. Real life nature and journey movies stand out for their scenery shots, revealing beautiful landscapes and animals in their natural habitat. Animated movies may encounter some difficulties when trying to achieve the same effect. Disney wisely chose to overcome this problem by using real film shots which were enhanced by strong video computers. The dinosaurs were a combination of computer controtlled graphics drawn by hand and by computer. The highlight of which is a powerful and beautiful openning scene of pre-historic landscape from a bird's flight.

All these efforts amounted to the following technical figures, brought here for the benefit of the statistics fans: with a budget of 127 million US Dollars; over 2000 special effects shots were taken just for the opening scene in which several thousands dinosaurs of 30 different species take part; 550 video processors were used 30,000 hours a week which amounted to an overall of 3.2 million hours of processing time. 48 animators took part in the making of 'Dinosaur'; a third of them came from a background of hand drawn animation; another third from still pictures animation; and another third from computer generated animation. The entire movie production time came to a staggering length of 4 years.

The major downsize of the movie is its scientific credebility.
Fortunately, the days of movies in which dinosaurs are farm animals and pets of humans, are behind us, yet still it was difficult for Disney to accept the fact that innocent children would have to identify with vicious creatures as the cold-blooded(?) dinosaurs. Of course, they couldn't use humans, which appeared approximately 65 million years after the dinosaurs. "That would be ridiculous", they thought, "even a child would know that this is preposterous". What they needed was an animal which will be ancient enough as well as humanoid. They tracked down the evolutionary tree and chose the Lemurs, an ancient primate species which still exists today. There are only two problems. First, Lemurs only appeared about 40 millions years ago, 25 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Using Lemurs in Dinosaur is as wrong as using humans. Disney probably thought, "a 25 million years gap is better than a 65 million one, the suckers wouldn't know the difference". Second, even if we over look this insignificant gap, the 40 million years ago 'Lemurs' were only the ancestors of now-days lemurs and were quite different from them by name and greatly by form. The lemurs in 'Dinosaur' are current lemurs.

In conclusion, don't expect too much from 'Dinosaur'. Watching it certainly won't bring you to new heights of thrills and excitement. Yet, bear in mind that 'Dinosaur' was meant for children, or at least as Disney see children, and as such it can sometimes seem banal, if not dull. As for children, I expect most would like it, or at least bear it impatiently. Most of the children in the theater I watched Dinosaur in sounded quite enthusiastic after the screening.
The graphics are sure worth it. Especially the opening scene which is spectacular and shows signs of some brilliant creative thinking, which unfortunately could not be found in the rest of the movie. Of course, you can watch the entire opening scene in the 'Dinosaur' promo.


credits source: http://imdb.com/

DINOSAURS. In geological terms, the dominant animal species on Earth. Their reign, unchallenged for over 160 million years, is some twentyfold in excess of even the most charitable estimate of the entire span of human evolution and was only moderated—not terminated—by an extinction 65 million years ago that otherwise destroyed most terrestrial life. Owing to incredible genetic diversity, their avian descendants have not merely survived but now number in the hundreds of billions.

The word “dinosaur” is also used non-zoologically as a term of derision, implying that one is slow, sluggish, stupid, ridiculously massive, unable to adapt, bound for extinction, or (in the language of birds) a human.

Encyclopedia Blipvertica.

Di"no*saur (?), Di`no*sau"ri*an (?), n. [Gr. terrible + lizard.] Paleon.

One of the Dinosauria.

[Written also deinosaur, and deinosaurian.]

 

© Webster 1913.

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