About this book
How this book works
This is a list of dinosaur names: 1,425 of them. It is not every single dinosaur that ever walked around. Most animals never became fossils, and scientists still find new names.
Birds are living dinosaurs. This book leaves out modern birds and keeps the older dinosaurs, the ones that lived before the asteroid.
Each page says what the animal ate, how it walked, how big it was, and where the bones were found.
What each column means
- Name
- The genus, which is how almost every dinosaur is known. Tyrannosaurus is the name; the species is rex.
- Scientific name
- The type species, the species that anchors the genus. If more species have been named, they are listed on the genus page.
- Years active
- The geological era and stage, plus an age in millions of years before the present. A genus known only from a long stage is given that whole stage, which can be broader than the quarry it came from.
- Year named
- The year the genus was published.
- Hip height, length, weight
- Hip height, length, and weight, in meters and feet, and in kilograms or tonnes. If a number was never established, the cell says “Not established.”
- Dino facts
- Short notes written for this book from the record: year, author, diet, gait, place, formation, clade, and size.
Names that might not stick
1,247 genera have at least one species still treated as valid. 117 are nomina dubia, doubtful names based on fossils that may be too poor to diagnose. 61 are disputed. The catalog can hide the doubtful and disputed names if you only want the secure ones.
Of the genera on file, 1,168 have a length, 689 have a hip height, and 930 have a weight.
Credit
Taxonomy, occurrence, diet, gait, and the raw measurements come from Open Paleo contributors, version 2026.10. The dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Open Paleo contributors. The project lives at github.com/open-paleo/data.