Magnosaurus

Magnosaurus is known from only a few bones, including parts of the jaw, backbone, hip, and legs, so scientists are still piecing together what it looked like.1

For a long time, scientists thought Magnosaurus was just a species of Megalosaurus, another meat-eating dinosaur. It was only in the 1990s that they started treating it as its own genus.1

Some scientists think Magnosaurus might be the same as Eustreptospondylus, another dinosaur from England, because their jaws look similar.12

The first Magnosaurus fossils were found in the 1800s by a man named W. Parker, near a place called Nethercomb in Dorset, England.1

Magnosaurus lived during the Middle Jurassic period, about 170 to 168 million years ago, when England was a very different place.14

Some scientists think Magnosaurus was one of the oldest known members of a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called Tetanurae, which includes famous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor.1