Megalosaurus Characteristics

Megalosaurus mrasured 30 feet (9 metres) in length, 10 feet (3 metres) in height and weighed around 1 ton. It had a very large head, powerful jaws and large sharp serrated teeth. Megalosaurs was a bipedal dinosaur, with a large bulky body and walked on its muscular, strong hind legs using its large, heavy, stiff tail for counter-balance. Megalosaurus was a relatively fast runner. The structure of the cervical vertebrae suggests that its neck would have been very flexible. Like all theropods, it had 3 forward facing toes and a single reversed one. Although they had not reached the minuscule size of later theropods like Tyrannosaurus, the fore limbs of Megalosaurus were small and probably had 3 or 4 clawed digits on each hand.

Megalosaurus may have hunted stegosaurs and sauropods. Repeated descriptions of Megalosaurus hunting Iguanodon (another of the earliest dinosaurs named) through the forests that then covered the continent are probably inaccurate, because Iguanodon skeletons are found in much younger Early Cretaceous formations.

Although Megalosaurus was a powerful carnivorous predator and could probably have attacked even the largest sauropods, it is also likely that it gained some of its food by scavenging. It would have had to eat huge amounts of meat to feed such a large body. Megalosaurus was a theropod dinosaur, whose intelligence (as measured by its relative brain to body weight, or EQ) was high among the dinosaurs.

Contrary to the claims made by a number of books dedicated to dinosaurs, no Megalosaurus fossils have been discovered in the continent of Africa.

Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur to be described in the scientific literature. Part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England in 1676. Megalosaurus trackways have also been found in limestone in southern England.

By 1824, Buckland had a piece of a lower jaw with teeth, some vertebrae and fragments of pelvis, scapula and hind limbs, probably not all from the same individual. Buckland identified the organism as being a giant animal related to the Sauria (lizards) and he placed it in the new genus Megalosaurus.