
Dinosaur - Wikipedia
Birds are avian dinosaurs, and phylogenetic taxonomy includes over 11,000 extant species in the group Dinosauria. Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles [note 1] of the clade Dinosauria. …
Dinosaur | Definition, Types, History, Names, & Facts | Britannica
Nov 11, 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.
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 …
Dinosaurs - National Geographic Society
Dinosaurs have long captured our imagination as reptilian creatures with menacing teeth, claws, spikes, and hammering, bony bulbs. They roamed Earth roughly 175 million years ago, and …
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 …
What Are Dinosaurs? - ScienceAlert
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of mostly land-based animals that are related to today's reptiles and birds. In fact, while dinosaurs are commonly seen as extinct and known only by their …
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, …
What is a Dinosaur? - Natural History Museum
What is a Dinosaur? Dinosaurs were a specialized group of land reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, also called the "Age of Dinosaurs". The Mesozoic was the period of time …
What is a dinosaur? - The Australian Museum
Dinosaurs include extinct animals we know from fossils and the birds we see today. The extinct animals we normally think of as dinosaurs had their heyday in the Mesozoic.