welcome to my dinos you are going to look at dinosaurs that can fly,swim and walk.have fun!

domingo, 3 de enero de 2010

The Megalosaurus

Dinosaurs

Megalosaurus – the ferocious meat eater

Megalosaurus was one of the first dinosaurs to be found and named. It should be pronounced as Meg-ah-low-sore-uss. The meaning of the word Megalosaurus is ‘great reptile'. It was a large meat-eating dinosaur and was known to have been lived around 175 million years ago during the Jurassic period. It was discovered in England in the year 1676. It was named by William Buckland in the year 1824. Later in the year 1827 Gideon Mantell assigned the species name Megalosaurus bucklandii to honor Mr. William Buckland.

Megalosaurus was known to have been around 30 feet (i.e.) nine meters long and it 10 feet tall (i.e.) three meters. This dinosaur was known to have been weighed around one ton. The dinosaur had a bulky body with heavy bones and long legs with clawed feet. The arms of the dinosaur were short as compared to the legs and the hand three fingers with sharp claws. It also had small bony knobs over each eye and large powerful jaws with sharp and long teeth, which enables it to eat meat. It was a fierce hunter and killer that could kill even large sauropods, which is another kind of dinosaur.

It was known to be more intelligent as compared to the other dinosaurs. The intelligence was measured by its relative brain to the body weight, which is also called as Emotional Intelligence. Megalosaurus was relatively fast runner as compared to other dinosaurs. The speed of the dinosaur was judged by scientists on the basis of their morphology (i.e.) the characteristics like estimated body and leg length. The speed was also judged on the basis of the fossilized track ways of the dinosaur. Megalosaurus was a lizard-hipped dinosaur also known as saurischian.

Initially, in the year 1676, a part of the skeleton of Megalosaurus was found at a limestone quarry at the city of Cornwell near oxford, situated at England. The bone was then sent to Robert Plot, who was the professor of chemistry at the Oxford University and he was also the first curator of the Ashmoean Museum. Pr. Robert plot identified it to be the thigh bone of a large animal, which was then found to be the bone of Megalosaurus. Then, more discoveries began in the year 1815 to know more about this dinosaur, which resulted in the discovery of a bone at the stones field quarry situated at the north of Oxford, which was acquired by William Buckland, who was the dean of Christ church and the professor of Geology at the Oxford University. Pr. William Buckland found some bones like fragments of pelvis, some vertebrae, hind limbs and a piece of lower jaw with teeth, which belonged to different Megalosaurus, with the help of which he found that all the bones belong to a giant animal which belonged to the lizard family and then he named it as Megalosaurus.

Among the different dinosaurs, Megalosaurus was regarded as the dangerous and ferocious dinosaur since it was a meat eater. Hope, you would have understood about Megalosaurus.

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