Albertosaurus: A Canadian Dinosaur & its Word Lore at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

Search this Canadian Word website. Can't find what you seek? Type word or phrase into box below to search the more than 500 pages of this website.

Thundering across the Alberta badlands there once galumphed a slavering flesh-eater, the nine-metre tall dinosaur, Albertosaurus, who tickled the scales at three tons, an early example of a Canadian with a weight problem. But, hey, it isn’t every province with a dinosaur named after it. Albertosaurus was only a teensy-weensy bit tinier than that humongous terror Tyrannosaurus rex.

Albertosaurus got dubbed in 1884, the same year its skull was first unearthed in the stark, bone-bed valley of the Red Deer River. The dino's digger-up was explorer Joseph Burr Tyrrell.

In Drumheller, Alberta, The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is—for this author—the place most worth visiting in the whole province of Alberta. Named after one of the earliest and best dinosaur-hunters ever to traipse the dry-ribbed gulches and arid arroyos of fossil-thick southern Alberta, the Tyrrell often garners first prize among world visitors and reptile experts as the best presented of all dinosaur collections in the entire world.

If you are planning a first visit to Alberta, put the Tyrrell Museum high on your list, right up there with the Rocky Mountains. The badlands beckon the leather-skinned poet of devastation in the true adventurer, the worldly wanderer drawn to the earth's empty quarters like T.E. Lawrence to the siren dunes of Arabia. British playwright Alan Bennett in his wonderful memory play “Forty Years On” had a character state that Lawrence was in fact attracted to Arabia by all the “unmade Bedouins.”

The Rockies appeal to the same people who like crystal sprinkles on their Christmas cards and tape little crosses to their dogs' collars and teach crippled chihuahuas to kneel down and fold their twisted little paws in Easter prayer while the wee doggies bark out the tune to “There is a Green Hill Far Away.” But, goodness now, I mustn't deprecate all bold Rocky Mountain stalwarts. Don't forget those other Rocky Mountain fans who flock like lemmings to go heliskiing and end up as human-flavoured slushies under twelve million tons of avalanche snow.

Origin of the word dinosaur

Like many words in science, dinosaur has two Greek roots. Deinos means ‘terrible’ or ‘frightening’ and saura means ‘lizard’ or ‘reptile.’ Most would agree that meeting an Albertosaurus for a swimming party in the Milk River 70 million years ago might have been a tad frightening. Yes, yes, I know the Milk River would not have been there, pace all the little Pleistocene nitpickers.

The precise moment of birth of a new word is, for most of our English vocabulary, lost in the forgetful mists of time. So it pleasant for word lovers to have the actual moment of origin of a word recorded, and with the term dinosaur we have it.

Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) was a pioneering British comparative anatomist who coined the term dinosauria first, recognizing them as a suborder of large, extinct reptiles. Owen had noticed that a group of fossils had common characteristics, including:

Column-like legs (instead of the sprawling legs that other reptiles have)
Five extra caudal vertebrae fused to the pelvic girdle, probably to support and move a massive tail.

Owen proposed this new name in a scientific paper published in the “Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science” in 1842. In that article, Owen wrote, “The combination of such characteristics all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.”

Sometimes we can travel back and the very beginning of a word is saved for us in the preservative amber of print. We ought not to rush to destroy the printed word and have everything written in light on computers. The problem with light is: sometimes the lights go out.

Saura, The Greek Word for Lizard in English Words

The Greek word for lizard sticks its tongue out in literature too. Compare one of the chief villains in Lord of The Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron. The author J.R.R. Tolkien was a classicist and named his villain after the Greek word for lizard. Now, in precise ancient Greek, sauron would mean ‘neuter lizard thing.’ Yech! You, Sauron, shall not be invited to my Stampede barbecue.

Saura also turns up in the name Tyrannosaurus rex. Translating the Greek and Latin elements in its name gives us ‘King Tyrant Reptile.’ Perhaps the most resonant ‘dino’ name is brontosaurus or ‘thunder lizard.’ Bronte, the Greek word for thunder, gives us an obscure but useful adjective. Some dogs are brontophobic. They are afraid of thunder and thunderstorms. Unfortunately the powerful sound of brontosaurus is no longer scientifically accurate. An earlier name for the same dinosaur has been found, and Brontie now goes, sadly, by the much milder, wimpier scientific name of epatosaurus. Sounds like a new burger at McPuke's.

For more Alberta dinosaur names from Canada, check out in your search engine entries for Centrosaurus brinkmani, Edmontosaurus and Lambeosaurus.