The first dinosaur ever named
William Buckland described it in 1824, eighteen years before the word dinosaur existed.
Jurassic Europe · Theropods
Megalosaurus
Great lizard · MEG-ah-lo-SORE-us
A large, heavily built hunter with a big head, strong arms and a long, stiff tail.
- Size
- About 9m long; 1 to 1.5 tonnes
- Lived
- About 166 million years ago
- Found in
- Oxfordshire, England
Strides 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 megalosaurus
First drawn on four legs
Early pictures showed it as a giant lizard walking on all fours. Statues like that still stand at Crystal Palace in London.
Once thought to be a giant's bone
A piece of its thigh bone, found in the 1600s, was first explained as coming from a giant human.
In a famous novel
Charles Dickens mentions a Megalosaurus waddling up a London street at the start of Bleak House.
A dustbin of a name
For over a century almost any big meat-eater found in Europe was called Megalosaurus.
Footprints in a quarry
Trackways in Oxfordshire, probably made by Megalosaurus, show it walking and then speeding up.
The real thing
Photos of the megalosaurus
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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, including long-necks and stegosaurs that lived on the same islands.
How we know
It is known from a jaw, teeth and scattered bones found in a slate quarry at Stonesfield.
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