Dino Lord's back. How's your week going so far hope good, because i'm going give you something that well want to be a paleontologist. Here's Megalosaurus Wednesday.
Megalosaurus was the dinosaur that started a great many things including the science of paleontology, the debate about if dinosaurs should be called names that end with that end with 'saurus' because they are not lizards, to lifetimes of fascination about the creatures that once walked the earth when we ourselves were an evolutionary dream.
A famous drawing by Edouard Riou from a era also shows two giant quadrupedal lizards identified as Megalosaurus and Iguanodon( the second dinosaur ever discovered) tearing chunks of flesh out of each other in some primordial battle.
Because Megalosaurus remains are so often associated with marine deposits the suggestion can be made that Megalosaurus frequent coastal regions at least some of the time, and from this a number of lifestyles can be inferred. One is that Megalosaurus was just like any other carnivorous theropod, hunting inland and only being on the coast coincidentally. The second is that Megalosaurus may have been taking advantage of special types of prey such as small plesiosaurs that were resting on land. The third is that Megalosaurus was a beach comber, scavenging washed up bodies or visiting tidal pools for trapped fist. Fourth and probably most likely is all of the above.
Megalosaurus was a large theropod and would have needed to make use of every available source, especially when you consider that the higher ocean levels of the Jurassic turned Europe into a chain of island that significantly reduced the available land mass for supporting terrestrial animal. Also Megalosaurus probably did not stick to one kind of prey of food source throughout its entire life, and probably changed its behavior and strategy during different stages of it's life.
Megalosaurus was the dinosaur that started a great many things including the science of paleontology, the debate about if dinosaurs should be called names that end with that end with 'saurus' because they are not lizards, to lifetimes of fascination about the creatures that once walked the earth when we ourselves were an evolutionary dream.
A famous drawing by Edouard Riou from a era also shows two giant quadrupedal lizards identified as Megalosaurus and Iguanodon( the second dinosaur ever discovered) tearing chunks of flesh out of each other in some primordial battle.
Because Megalosaurus remains are so often associated with marine deposits the suggestion can be made that Megalosaurus frequent coastal regions at least some of the time, and from this a number of lifestyles can be inferred. One is that Megalosaurus was just like any other carnivorous theropod, hunting inland and only being on the coast coincidentally. The second is that Megalosaurus may have been taking advantage of special types of prey such as small plesiosaurs that were resting on land. The third is that Megalosaurus was a beach comber, scavenging washed up bodies or visiting tidal pools for trapped fist. Fourth and probably most likely is all of the above.
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