Dinosaur names look impossible until you notice they are built from parts. Students learn ten Greek and Latin roots, then predict what unfamiliar names mean before checking — turning lookup into reasoning.
The sting is Oviraptor, “egg thief”: named in 1924 for raiding a nest, shown seventy years later to have been sitting on its own eggs. The name was never changed. Students are asked whether it should have been.
Three pages: two student sheets and a teacher page with answers.
Dinosaur names look impossible until you notice they are built from parts — mostly Greek and Latin, mostly describing what the animal looked like, where it was found, or who found it. Once you can read the parts, you can often work out a name you have never seen.
| Word part | Means | Appears in |
|---|---|---|
| saurus | lizard | |
| raptor | thief, seizer | |
| tri– | three | |
| ceratops | horned face | |
| micro– | small | |
| giganto– | giant | |
| tyranno– | tyrant, ruler | |
| ptery– | wing, feather | |
| cryo– | cold, frozen | |
| –lophus | crest |
Fill the last column by hunting through the atlas for a dinosaur containing each part. Some parts appear in several.
Cover the atlas. Using only the table above, work out what each name should mean.
| Name | My prediction |
|---|---|
| Microraptor | |
| Cryolophosaurus | |
| Triceratops |
Now check each one in the atlas. How many did you get close to?
Not every name describes the animal. Find one dinosaur in the atlas for each kind.
| Kind of name | Dinosaur | What the name means |
|---|---|---|
| Describes the body a shape, a horn, a crest | ||
| Describes the place a country, region or site | ||
| Honours a person often ends –i or –orum |
Whose eggs were they, and what was the animal actually doing? Read the Oviraptor dossier in the atlas.
The name was never changed. Should it have been? Give a reason for your answer.
Invent a dinosaur. Build its name from at least two real word parts — from the table, or others you find in the atlas glossary.
| My dinosaur’s name | |
| It means | |
| Because |
This is vocabulary and morphology work — decoding unfamiliar words from known roots — using material children are already motivated to read. The skill transfers directly: a student who can take Cryolophosaurus apart has the same tool for thermometer, microscope and photosynthesis.
Question 2 is the pivot. Students predict before checking, which turns it from lookup into reasoning, and makes a near-miss as valuable as a hit.
Accept anything close in meaning. “Tiny stealer” is a correct reading of Microraptor.
Named by Henry Osborn in 1924 from a specimen found atop a clutch of eggs assumed to belong to Protoceratops. In the 1990s an embryo inside the same egg type showed the eggs were Oviraptor’s own: the animal was brooding its nest, not robbing one. Osborn himself flagged at the time that the name might mislead.
The name stands because zoological nomenclature does not rename species when the reasoning behind the name is overturned — priority is fixed at publication. That is a genuinely good discussion: a rule that preserves stability at the cost of accuracy.
Expect both answers on “should it have been changed?” and mark the reasoning, not the position. This question pairs directly with the Science Changes Its Mind worksheet, which treats the same episode at greater length.
| Curriculum | Strand |
|---|---|
| New Zealand | English — Language features: word derivations and structure. Nature of Science — how scientific names are decided and why they persist. |
| England (KS2) | English — word structure, prefixes and suffixes, etymology and morphology in the spelling appendix. |
| Common Core (USA) | CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.4.4.B, L.5.4.B — use common Greek and Latin affixes and roots as clues to meaning. |
| Australia | English — Language: expanding vocabulary, word origins and morphology. |