What do you call a scientist who studies dinosaurs?

A palaeontologist, and dinosaurs are a small and glamorous corner of the job - most palaeontologists work on things like pollen, foraminifera or trilobites, which are more numerous, more useful for dating rock, and attract no film crews at all.

The word dinosaur was coined in 1842 by Richard Owen, meaning terrible lizard, and he intended it to describe a distinct group of large reptiles rather than a monster. He also founded the Natural History Museum, and was widely disliked - Darwin called him spiteful - partly for a habit of taking credit for other people's fossils.

The single largest change in the field is that dinosaurs are not extinct. Birds are dinosaurs, descended from small feathered theropods, and the evidence became overwhelming in the 1990s with feathered fossils from Liaoning in China. That reframes the animal: an ostrich is not like a dinosaur, it is one, and the reasonable modern picture of a velociraptor is a feathered animal about the size of a turkey. It also changes the extinction story - the asteroid killed the non-avian dinosaurs, and one branch of the family is currently sitting in your garden.