Megalosaurus is a genus of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs belonging to the Tetanurae group, who lived in the area of current England during late Jura about 165 million years ago.
On birds after, Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur to be named. The gender was given in 1824 its name, which means "Huge Lizard". A valid type of species, Megalosaurus bucklandii, was only nominated in 1827. In 1842, Megalosaurus was one of the three genera, housed by Richard Owen, in the first Dinosaurian distinctive group of reptiles. Being the first recognized carnivorous dinosaur, it became a custom to name all kinds of loose teeth and bones of theropods as a kind of Megalosaurus. Thus, the genus received more species than any other extinct dinosaur, more than fifty. Nowadays, it is understood that they do not really have anything to do with the real Megalosaurus, and there is only one valid species: the original Megalosaurus bucklandii. From M. bucklandii, a whole skeleton has never been found so much remains unclear about the animal's construction.
The first scholars who examined Megalosaurus did not quite understand what he looked like. They thought it was a giant lizard of twenty meters long. In 1842, Owen realized that Megalosaurus was no longer than nine meters and was straight on his feet. He still saw the animal as a four-legged dog. By comparison with his close relatives, the Megalosauridae, the current scientists got a much better picture. Megalosaurus was roughly seven meters long and one and a half tons heavy. He walked on two hind legs, keeping his horizontal trunk balanced by a straight tail. His forelegs were short but firm. He had a big head with long dagger-shaped teeth. Like his sister species, the American Torvosaurus, Megalosaurus was very heavily built and muscled.
Vondst and naming human scrotumThe genus Megalosaurus is often associated with what is called in many popular scientific books as the first dinosaur name. In 1677, Professor Robert Plot, in his natural history of Oxford-shire, described the bottom of a fossil femur, in the vicinity of Oxford, in a quarry, at the village of Cornwell near Chipping Norton. Plot received the gift of Sir Thomas Pennyson. Plot itself gave no name to the find; He first thought that the bone belonged to a Roman warrior elephant and later that it was from a giant. Nowadays, the specimen has been lost, but in 1763 Plot's original engraving was depicted by Richard Brookes in his Natural History of Waters, Earths, Stones, Fossils, and Minerals with their Virtues, Properties and Medicinal Uses and described as a fossilized Hummus Scrotum , a "human ball bag". Brooks did not do that because he thought it was really a foul testicle; At the time it was the habit of describing such curiosa or "nature plays" as the object with which they were most similar. He also did not mention the name as a formal biological name; but, like Linnaeus himself, he also applied his classification method to geological objects. The very first, later described Scrotum Humanum, described dinosaur fossil was probably also of Megalosaurus
However, in paleontologist Lambert Beverly Halstead, paleontologist Lambert suggested that the description should be considered as a valid name in principle since it was published after Linnaeus's first work and imitated its naming method. That Brooks saw the object first as a stone, and Scrotum Humanum only appeared in a caption of an image, he considered irrelevant. Only the fact that the name had been forgotten would make her a nomenclature that did not have priority over Megalosaurus - Halstead considered the acquaintance
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