Megalosaurus

A predator at the top

Megalosaurus was a large, meat-eating theropod that walked on two stout hindlimbs, balancing a long tail against a mostly horizontal body. It reached roughly 6 meters, or about 20 feet, in length. Its forelimbs were short but robust, and its head was large, armed with long, curved, blade-like teeth suited to a predator at the top of its food chain. No complete skeleton of Megalosaurus has ever been found, so parts of its build are still pieced together from partial remains.

Its world

Megalosaurus lived in the Middle Jurassic, about 168 to 166 million years ago, in what is now southern England and northern France. Its fossils come from rock layers including the Cotswold Slate, the Forest Marble, the Chipping Norton Limestone and the Taynton Limestone. It shared this world with the long-necked sauropod Cetiosaurus. For more than a century, fossils of many other big meat-eaters from other times and places were also filed under Megalosaurus. Most of them have since been moved to other genera, and only the Middle Jurassic material from England is thought to belong to it.

How it was found

Parkinson named Megalosaurus in 1822, years before the word dinosaur was even coined. Because no complete skeleton of Megalosaurus has been found, later scientists have had to build up a picture of it from teeth, jaw fragments, and isolated bones collected over time. Its closest relatives include Torvosaurus, Eustreptospondylus, and Afrovenator, part of the wider family Megalosauridae, which helps fill some of the gaps left by its own incomplete fossils.