Megalosauridae
| Megalosauridae | ||||||||||||
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Skeleton reconstruction of Piatnitzkysaurus |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Middle to Upper Jurassic ( Bathonian to Lower Tithonian ) | ||||||||||||
| 168.3 to 147.7 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
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Worldwide |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Megalosauridae | ||||||||||||
| Huxley , 1869 | ||||||||||||
The Megalosauridae are a group within the theropod dinosaurs . The name goes back to the first scientifically described dinosaur Megalosaurus . For a long time, the megalosaurids were a "trash can group" in which all theropods that could not be clearly assigned to other families were placed. With increasing knowledge of theropods, more and more genera were assigned to other groups.
Today the name Megalosauridae is rarely used in scientific literature and is then mostly limited to a few genera of massively built theropods from the Central Jurassic of Europe . One of the problems is the fragmentary knowledge of the genus Megalosaurus itself, which does not allow a satisfactory diagnosis of this family.
Most of the "classical" megalosaurs, including probably Megalosaurus itself, are now counted among the Spinosauroidea . In the popular literature, however, the name Megalosauridae is often found in its earlier form as the largest family of Carnosauria , which occurred from the Middle Jurassic to the Upper Jurassic.
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Spinosauroidea
- Megalosauridae
literature
- Thomas R. Holtz Jr. , Ralph E. Molnar, Philip J. Currie : Basal Tetanurae. In: David B. Weishampel , Peter Dodson , Halszka Osmólska (eds.): The Dinosauria . 2nd edition. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 2004, ISBN 0-520-24209-2 , pp. 71-110.
Individual evidence
- ^ Gregory S. Paul : The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-13720-9 , pp. 86-87, online .
