Dinosaurs inhabited Earth for around one hundred and seventy million years, and in that vast period of time, many different types of dinosaurs evolved and became extinct.
(Human beings have only existed for three hundred thousand years; a tiny fraction of the time that dinosaurs existed.)
In order to understand the relationships between different types of dinosaurs, paleontologists organize individual dinosaur species into groups of related species.
For example, Tyrannosaurus rex was part of a family of dinosaurs known as Tyrannosauridae, which itself was part of an even larger group of dinosaurs: Saurischia, which contained both predatory and herbivorous species.
On this page, we list the major dinosaur groups, and provide examples of dinosaurs of each type.
(If you want to see a list of individual dinosaurs rather than types of dinosaurs, visit this page: List of Dinosaurs.)
