On my short walk this afternoon, I spotted an orange dinosaur grazing on the football field.
Back home, I asked AI what would be its Latin name, and learned that it would be either a Dinosaurius Aurantiacus, or possibly an Aurantiosaurus. **
Letting my phone camera zoom it in through a whole in the mesh fence, it became a little clearer what was going on, though:
They are now obviously getting started on the project of turning the big empty football field into a park - which I wrote about back in May, in a post entitled A Field Day. According to the information I took part of then, the corner where they have now started digging is where they plan to build a gigantic outdoor stage.
In case you don't want to bother about going back to that post, below is the image of what they are planning to construct, again. (Please note the size of the people inside it.) How it tall it might in the end turn out to be compared to an Aurantiosaurus with its neck upright, I'm still not sure.
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** Because the ancient Romans did not know about dinosaurs, modern scientists and linguists created Neo-Latin words to describe them.
The literal translation of "orange dinosaur" into New Latin is dinosaurus aurantiacus.
The translation is broken down as follows:
Component Breakdown
- Orange: Aurantiacus (or aurantius) is the standard Neo-Latin adjective for the color orange.
- Dinosaur: Dinosaurus is the accepted Neo-Latin noun. (Note that while dinosaurus uses a Latin suffix, it originally derives from the ancient Greek words deinos, meaning "terrible", and sauros, meaning "lizard").
Scientific Nomenclature Style
If you are looking to name a specific, fictional dinosaur species using standard scientific naming conventions (binomial nomenclature), you would combine Latin and Greek roots:
- Aurantiosaurus: Meaning "Orange Lizard" (Combining the Latin root for orange with the Greek root for lizard).
- Dinosaurus aurantiacus: Meaning "Orange-colored Dinosaur" (Written as a specific species type).
(Source: Google AI)
