Megalosaurus

Discovery

Megalosaurus was one of the first dinosaurs to be described. Part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Oxford, England in 1676. The fragment was sent to Robert Plot, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and first curator of the Ashmolean Museum, who published a description in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677. He correctly identifed the bone as the lower extremity of the femur of a large animal, and he recognized that it was too large to belong to any known species; he considered it to be the thigh bone of a giant. The bone has since been lost but the illustration is detailed enough to identify it clearly as the femur of a Megalosaurus.

Related Topics:
Dinosaur - Cornwell - Oxford - England - 1676 - Robert Plot - University of Oxford - Ashmolean Museum - Femur

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The Cornwell bone was described again by Joshua Brookes in 1763, who named it Scrotum humanum based on the similarity of appearance to a pair of human testicles. (Although this name theoretically has priority, subsequent authors have chosen to treat it is as joke rather than a serious attempt to propose a scientific name, or possibly not compliant with binomial nomenclature but rather with the old, descriptive approach).

Related Topics:
Joshua Brookes - Binomial nomenclature

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More discoveries were made starting in 1815, this time at the Stonesfield quarry north of Oxford, and they were acquired by William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford and dean of Christ Church.

Related Topics:
Stonesfield - William Buckland - Christ Church

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Physician James Parkinson described them in an article in 1822, and two years later Buckland published his own paper. By 1824, he had a piece of a lower jaw with teeth, some vertebrae, and fragments of pelvis, scapula and hind limbs from several individuals. Buckland identified the organism as being a giant animal related to the Sauria (lizards), and he named it Megalosaurus, estimating it to be 40 feet (12 m) long. In 1827 Gideon Mantell gave this dinosaur its name: Megalosaurus bucklandi ("Buckland's big lizard").

Related Topics:
Physician - 1822 - Vertebra - Pelvis - Scapula - Sauria - Gideon Mantell

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