A claw found by a plumber
In 1983 an amateur collector, William Walker, found a 30-centimetre claw in a Surrey clay pit.
The great hunters · Theropods
Baryonyx
Heavy claw · BARE-ee-ON-ix
A long-snouted hunter with a crocodile-like head and a huge curved claw on each thumb.
- Size
- About 9 to 10m long; 1.5 to 2 tonnes
- Lived
- About 130 to 125 million years ago
- Found in
- Surrey, England; also Spain and Portugal
Wades after you, snout low. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the baryonyx
Fish in its stomach
Fish scales and the bones of a young Iguanodon were found inside its ribs.
A crocodile's snout
Its long, narrow jaws held 96 teeth: twice as many as most meat-eaters.
Cousin of Spinosaurus
It belongs to the same fish-eating family.
From the south of England
It lived when southern England was a land of rivers and lagoons.
Britain's best meat-eater
It is one of the most complete meat-eating dinosaur skeletons found in Britain.
The real thing
Photos of the baryonyx
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Fish, hooked from the water with its claws or snatched in its jaws, and sometimes other dinosaurs.
How we know
The skeleton is in the Natural History Museum in London, and its last meal was found with it.
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