Word of the Day:
plesiosaur
What It Means
Any of the order †Plesiosauria of extinct marine reptiles, from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
Plesiosaur in Context
“It is the first time in Australia the head and body of an elasmosaur, a type of plesiosaur, has been found in one piece.”
Did You Know?
Backformation of translingual Plesiosaurus, named by William Conybeare and Henry De la Beche in 1824 because plesiosaurs were more like a normal reptile than Ichthyosaurus, which had been found in the same rock strata a few years earlier. Surface derivation, plesio- + -saur.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: plesiosaur (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “plesiosaur.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plesiosaur. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
