Two crests
The paper-thin crests were for show. They were far too fragile to use as weapons.
Jurassic Europe · Theropods
Dilophosaurus
Two-crested lizard · die-LOAF-oh-SORE-us
A slender hunter with a pair of thin, rounded crests along the top of its head.
- Size
- About 7m long; 400kg
- Lived
- About 193 million years ago
- Found in
- Arizona, USA
Lopes after you. 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 dilophosaurus
The film got it wrong
In a famous film it spits venom and spreads a frill. There is no evidence for either.
Bigger than in the film
The real animal was about seven metres long: one of the largest hunters of its day.
A notch in its jaw
A kink near the tip of its upper jaw gave it a look a little like a crocodile's.
Found on Navajo land
The first skeletons were found in 1940 by a Navajo man, Jesse Williams.
An early Jurassic hunter
It lived tens of millions of years before Allosaurus.
The real thing
Photos of the dilophosaurus
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
Other dinosaurs and probably fish.
How we know
Three skeletons were found together in Arizona, and later finds showed the crests.
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