Question 1

How do you say gigas?

Accepted Answer

Gigas is pronounced JY-gus, with the first syllable rhyming with 'sky' or 'fly.' The G makes a hard sound like in 'go,' not a soft sound like in 'gem.' When you see it in a full dinosaur name like Giganotosaurus, the whole thing is pronounced jih-GAN-oh-SOR-us, but the gigas root at the start keeps that same hard G sound. Say it confidently and you will sound like a real paleontologist.

Question 2

What does gigas mean in dinosaur names?

Accepted Answer

Gigas is a Greek word meaning giant, and scientists use it in dinosaur names to signal that the animal was extraordinarily large, even by dinosaur standards. It does not just mean big in a general way but implies something almost mythologically enormous, which is exactly where the word comes from since the ancient Greeks used it for divine giants called the Gigantes. When you see gigas or gigant in a dinosaur name, you can be sure that creature was among the largest of its kind ever found.

Question 3

What dinosaurs have gigas in their name?

Accepted Answer

Several famous dinosaurs use this root, including Giganotosaurus carolinii, one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs ever discovered, found in Argentina and described in 1995. The root also appears in names like Gigantoscelus, a large prosauropod from the Triassic of South Africa, and Gigantopithecus, a massive prehistoric ape. Variations using gigant- include Gigantosaurus and Gigantopithecus blacki, the latter being a real giant ape from Asia that lived until about 300,000 years ago. The related ending giganteus or gigantea appears in many 19th century species names applied to unusually large fossil specimens.

Question 4

Is gigas Latin or Greek?

Accepted Answer

Gigas is Greek in origin, coming from the ancient Greek word for the mythological Giants called the Gigantes. However, because scientific Latin borrowed so heavily from Greek, you will often see it described as a Latin scientific term as well. The root entered formal scientific naming through the Latin tradition established by Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s, even though its ultimate origin is Greek. When scientists write it in a species name, they treat it grammatically as Latin, which is why the ending sometimes changes to forms like giganteus or gigantea depending on context.

Question 5

What is Giganotosaurus and why is it called that?

Accepted Answer

Giganotosaurus carolinii is a massive theropod dinosaur discovered in Patagonia, Argentina, in 1993 and scientifically described in 1995 by paleontologists Rodolfo Coria and Leonardo Salgado. Its name means giant southern lizard, combining the Greek gigas meaning giant, notos meaning south, and sauros meaning lizard. It is named for both its enormous size and its location in the Southern Hemisphere. With an estimated length of 12 to 13 meters and a skull nearly 1.8 meters long, the name is fully justified. It is considered one of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found, rivaling Tyrannosaurus rex in overall size.

Question 6

Where does the word gigabyte come from?

Accepted Answer

Gigabyte comes from the same Greek root gigas meaning giant or enormous. The prefix giga- was officially adopted by the International System of Units in 1960 to represent one billion, because a billion of something seemed incomprehensibly large at the time, much like the mythological giants the word originally described. So when you download a 2 gigabyte game, you are literally downloading two billion bytes of data, and the word connecting you to that number is the same ancient Greek root that scientists use to name giant dinosaurs. Language, math, and mythology all meet in a single prefix.

Question 7

What is the difference between gigas and mega in dinosaur names?

Accepted Answer

Both gigas and mega mean large or great, but they come from slightly different traditions and carry different nuances. Mega comes from Greek megas meaning great or large and is used as a prefix in words like Megalosaurus, meaning great lizard. Gigas specifically implies giant in the most extreme sense, evoking the mythological Giants of ancient Greece who were divine and almost supernatural in their power. In practice, paleontologists use both roots for large dinosaurs, but gigas tends to appear when a creature is particularly exceptional in size even among its already large relatives. Mega is slightly more common and appears in more dinosaur names overall.

Question 8

Are there any living animals with gigas in their scientific name?

Accepted Answer

Yes, quite a few living species carry this root in their official scientific names. Crassostrea gigas is the Pacific oyster, the most widely farmed oyster in the world, named for its relatively large size. Macropus giganteus is the eastern gray kangaroo, one of the largest living marsupials. Gorilla gorilla is sometimes informally connected to giant roots in popular writing, though its actual name comes from a different ancient source. The use of gigas and giganteus in naming living species follows exactly the same tradition as in dinosaur naming, stretching back to Linnaeus and his system of binomial nomenclature established in 1758.

Question 9

Why do so many dinosaur names end in us?

Accepted Answer

The ending -us is a Latin masculine nominative singular ending, which means it is the standard way to end the name of a thing in Latin when that thing is treated as masculine. Since scientific names must follow Latin grammar, genus names for dinosaurs almost always end in -us, -a, or rarely -on or -ix. When gigas is used as a species name, it keeps its Greek form because it is an irregular noun in both Greek and Latin that does not change its ending the way regular nouns do. This is why you see Giganotosaurus, where the genus ends in -us but the species name carolinii is in a different Latin form entirely, following the rule that species names honoring a person take a different ending.

Question 10

What were the Giants in Greek mythology?

Accepted Answer

In Greek mythology, the Gigantes were a race of powerful divine warriors born from the blood of the sky god Uranus when he was wounded by his son Cronus. They are described in detail by the ancient poet Hesiod around 700 BCE in his work the Theogony. The Gigantes famously fought the Olympian gods in a battle called the Gigantomachy, hurling boulders and uprooted trees at Mount Olympus itself. The gods ultimately defeated them with the help of the hero Heracles. Because these beings represented the ultimate in physical power and enormous scale, their name, gigas, became the Greek word for anything of extraordinary size, eventually traveling through centuries of scientific Latin into modern dinosaur names.

Question 11

How do paleontologists decide to put gigas in a dinosaur name?

Accepted Answer

Paleontologists typically use gigas or gigant- when measurements of a new specimen show it to be significantly larger than all other known members of its group. This is an objective scientific decision based on comparing bone dimensions to previously described species. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature does not have strict rules about which descriptive roots to choose, so scientists have creative latitude, but using gigas for a merely average-sized animal would be considered misleading by the scientific community. There is also a tradition element: when a 19th century scientist used gigas for something large, modern scientists working in the same tradition follow that precedent. The name must be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal to be officially valid.

Question 12

What is gigantism and is it related to the dinosaur word?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the medical term gigantism comes from exactly the same Greek root gigas. Gigantism is a condition in humans and some animals caused by the overproduction of growth hormone, usually due to a tumor on the pituitary gland, which results in exceptional height and body size if it occurs before the growth plates in bones have closed. In humans, gigantism has produced individuals over 2.7 meters tall, most famously Robert Wadlow of Illinois who stood 2.72 meters at the time of his death in 1940, making him the tallest verified human in recorded history. The same root connects a medical condition, ancient mythology, and dinosaur names across thousands of years of human language.

gigas — giant Pronunciation

What does gigas — giant mean?

Name Roots

Fun Facts

Learn More About gigas — giant

Related Name Roots