At first it is easy for a three year old to love dinosaurs. Dinos have razor sharp teeth, deadly attack moves, and thick armor. My three year old daughter loves them, but I already see trouble ahead. Today her favorite dinosaur is the Quetzalcoatlus. (Named after the Aztec serpent god.) Yesterday it was the Coelophysis. (Greek for hollow horn.)Right there is the problem. Who comes up with these names? Aztec serpent god? Greek anything? That is totally not child friendly. I do not want to invent any bed-time story of the lost Quetzalcoatlus named Emily. Emily asked for help from the friendly Pterodactylus family. (Greek for wing finger.)  Ouch.

I would guess the most popular dinosaurs are not the coolest, but the only dinosaur names regular people can remember. The top five standard dinos are… T-Rex, Triceratops, Stegasaurus, Velociraptor, and probably Brontosaurus.

To stay current with my eight year old newphew I took up Yu Gi Oh cards. Pretty quickly we both had car battle decks numbering in the hundreds. I have about fifty memorised, but my nephew can list every card name, attack points, defense points, and special effects. He also loves dinosuars. But when coloring with my three year old daughter we could not remember the dinasaur that looks sort of like a Stegasaurus (Greek for roof-lizard), but not quite. Brutal names.

The fix for this is to use the Internet Age technique of having two names. One authentic name for the serious Scientific Community and one friendly nickname for every other person on the planet. Quetzalcoatlus/Skybax (from the Dinotopia series).

Wikipedia could start an online poll for a cool name for each dinosaur. The first name to be approved by Wiki and have over a million votes sticks. That would be fun. Or send a polite email to the makers of Yu-gi-oh to nickname every known dinosaur.

The ultimate goal being read-able cool stories for kids growing up. And their poor dad trying to pronounce Coelophysis.

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