Dino card No. 0543 of 2,015

Dryptosaurus

Say it: DRIP-toh-SOR-us

Name means: “tearing lizard”1

Ate: MeatTyrannosaursEarly Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous

Dryptosaurus was a fierce meat-eating dinosaur that lived on the East Coast of the United States. It had strong arms with big claws and sharp, blade-like teeth. It was an early cousin of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex.1

Lived

113 to 66 million years ago4

Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

New Jersey, USA, and possibly North Carolina and Wyoming, USA1 3

Food

Meat1 2

Length

6.4 to 7.5 m2 1

estimates vary

Weight

756 kg to 1.5 tonnes1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

Dryptosaurus had long arms with big claws, unlike later tyrannosaurs like T. rex which had tiny arms.1

Its teeth were ziphodont, meaning they were sharp, blade-like, and flattened from side to side, different from the thick teeth of larger tyrannosaurs.1

Dryptosaurus lived on the East Coast of the United States, which was part of an island continent called Appalachia during the Late Cretaceous.1

The first Dryptosaurus skeleton was found by fertilizer miners in New Jersey, and it was one of the first nearly complete theropod skeletons discovered in North America.1

Dryptosaurus fossils were found in a marine formation, meaning the dinosaur's body floated out to sea and sank to the ocean floor before becoming fossilized.1

Scientists think Dryptosaurus was an intermediate tyrannosaur, more lightly built than later giants like T. rex but more advanced than early small tyrannosaurs.1

AI-made picture of Dryptosaurus — An AI-made picture of how Dryptosaurus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

Myth buster

Myth: Some people think Dryptosaurus was a type of bird because its name sounds similar to 'dromaeosaur'.

Truth: Dryptosaurus was a theropod dinosaur, closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex, not a bird. It belonged to the group Tyrannosauroidea.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Dryptosaurus
Named by: Marsh 18774
Group: Tyrannosaurs
Family / clade: Tyrannosauroidea4
Classification: Theropoda > Tyrannosauroidea4
Age of the rocks: 113 to 66 million years (Albian to Maastrichtian)4
Rock formations: Lance, Marshalltown, New Egypt4
Countries: USA4
Fossil records: 13 in the Paleobiology Database4
Also known as: Laelaps (older names now counted as the same animal)4
Discovery: The first Dryptosaurus fossils were found in 1866 by workers at a marl pit in New Jersey. Edward Drinker Cope described them as Laelaps aquilunguis, but later Othniel Marsh renamed the dinosaur Dryptosaurus in 1877.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure about the exact size of Dryptosaurus, with estimates ranging from 6.4 to 7.5 metres long. They also debate whether some fragmentary fossils from other states belong to Dryptosaurus.1 2

Where the facts come from

Dryptosaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Dryptosaurus | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Dryptosaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.