Largest Carnivourous Dinosaur Ever Found in Europe

[Pckts]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In Europe 150 million years ago, this dude was the biggest, baddest bully in town. Two scientists in Portugal announced on Wednesday that they have identified the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever found in Europe, a 33-foot-long (10-meter-long) brute called Torvosaurus gurneyi that was the scourge of its domain in the Jurassic Period.

 

"It was indeed better not to cross the way of this large, carnivorous dinosaur," said paleontologist Christophe Hendrickx of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã in Portugal.Torvosaurus gurneyi was an imposing beast. It was bipedal, weighed four to five tons, had a skull almost 4 feet long, boasted powerful jaws lined with blade-shaped teeth four inches long, and may have been covered with an early type of feather, Hendrickx said."Torvosaurus gurneyi was obviously a super predator feeding on large prey like herbivorous dinosaurs," Hendrickx said.Remains of the new species were unearthed in Portugal by an amateur fossil hunter in 2003 in the rock cliffs of Lourinhã, a small town about 45 miles north of Lisbon, Hendrickx said. He said fossilized embryos probably belonging to this species were identified last year in Portugal.The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.At the time that Torvosaurus prowled the landscape, the region was a lush river delta with abundant fresh water and vegetation. The area teemed with dinosaurs and flying reptiles known as pterosaurs, primitive birds, crocodiles, turtles and mouse-sized mammals, according to paleontologist Octávio Mateus, also of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinhã.Plant-eating dinosaurs living in the area included the huge, long-necked Lusotitan, the armored, tank-like Dracopelta and the spiky-tailed Miragaia, Mateus added.The two scientists said this is the second species of the genus Torvosaurus. The other one, Torvosaurus tanneri, lived at the same time in North America. It was known from the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming and was identified in 1979.Its genus name, Torvosaurus, means "savage lizard." Its species name, gurneyi, honors James Gurney, the author and illustrator of the popular "Dinotopia" book series.Torvosaurus gurneyi was not the only meat-eating dinosaur in its neighborhood. For example, there was a European species of the well-known North American Jurassic predator Allosaurus, but the Torvosaurus found in Portugal was larger.Torvosaurus gurneyi not only is the largest known meat-eating dinosaur from Europe, but is the biggest land predator of any kind ever found on the continent, they added.There were larger dinosaur carnivores elsewhere, however.Tyrannosaurus in North America, Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus in North Africa and Giganotosaurus in Argentina all were bigger, but appeared on Earth much later than Torvosaurus, during the Cretaceous Period that followed the Jurassic Period."This animal, Torvosaurus, was already a fossil for 80 million years before the T. rex ever walked the Earth," Mateus said.During the Jurassic Period from about 200 million years ago to 145 million years ago, carnivorous dinosaurs generally were medium-sized, with an average length of about 7 to 16 feet. Larger ones like Torvosaurus, Allosaurus and Saurophaganax arrived in the late Jurassic Period.(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Grant McCool)

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[Pckts]

Largest Carnivorous Dinosaurs Ever

*This image is copyright of its original author

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[GuateGojira]

This image is no longer accurate. Check this topic:
http://wildfact.com/forum/topic-spinosaurus-news

There is the new image of Spinosaurus.
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[Pckts]

I don't see much of a difference, I used it more for scale than anything else. Reply

[GuateGojira]

In length, you are probably right, although there is a significant reduction from 19 m long from Dal Sasso to the new 15 m long of the new estimation.

Also, the weight of 20 ton most be discarded completely, this giant was at the best between 6 to 9 tons. Very long but also light.

Finally, the old image show it as a tall animal, while the new reconstruction show him at barely 3 m tall at the hips.

For scale is good, but the old image is still inaccurate.

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[Pckts]

If you have better scales available, feel free to post them. I am certainly not as knowledgeable in Dinosaurs as I am in big cats.

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[GuateGojira]

That will be hard, especially by the fact that there are already a group of "hard-core-spinosaurus-fans" that don't agree with the new form, and that sadly, swarm the popular places like Wikipedia (from where you get that old scale).

The good thing is that I can do it, after all, we have the new reconstruction of Spinosaurus and the amazing T.rex (and other predators) draws from Scott Harman. So, give me a few days and I will present the new image, although it will be just to be used here and not in other places.

If you want to know more on dinosaurs, just tell which ones do you need and I can get information about them.
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[GuateGojira]

I found this "new" image from Wikipedia:

*This image is copyright of its original author

It still show the bipedal form of Spinosaurus, but it show now its hip height. On the T.rex issue, I think that Sue was in fact, just slightly smaller than 4 m at the hip, so this image seems accurate, although should be a little taller.
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[DinoFan83]

Other post deleted as it's no longer relevant. It looks like we have an even larger megalosaurid specimen (as in >8 tonnes) that may or may not uphold the thread.

Rauhut et al. 2018 has described an anterior caudal centrum of a very large Iberian megalosaurid catalogued as MUJA-1913. They suggest it's the largest carnivorous dinosaur found so far from Europe, and I think they are very likely correct. Relevant quotes from the paper are as follows.

Quote:One striking feature of the vertebra from the Vega Formation is its enormous size. With a posterior centrum height of 150 mm, MUJA-1913 is larger than most anterior caudals for which measurements can be found in the literature. In particular, anterior caudals of Torvosaurus tanneri are about 25% smaller (Britt, 1991), an anterior caudal of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus is c. 10% smaller (Stromer, 1915), and one of the largest theropod caudals from the Jurassic, for which measurements were given, a possible carcharodontosaurid caudal from the Tendaguru Formation (Rauhut, 2011), is also c. 25% smaller than the specimen described here. Larger caudal vertebrae are present in the gigantic Cretaceous carcharodontosaurids (Canale, Novas & Pol, 2015) and Tyrannosaurus (Brochu, 2003), but might also be found in the largest allosauroid predators of the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western USA (Chure, 1995 , 2000 ; Williamson & Chure, 1996), though no measurements are available in the literature for these specimens. However this may be, Hendrickx & Mateus (2014) argued that the holotype of Torvosaurus gurneyi represented the largest theropod dinosaur yet recorded from Europe (see also specimens described by Malafaia et al., 2017a). This specimen includes a partial anterior caudal vertebra, the posterior articular surface of which is about 15% smaller than that of MUJA-1913. Thus, given that the specimen from the Vega Formation probably belongs to a closely related taxon, this specimen probably represents the largest theropod dinosaur recorded so far in Europe, and represents an apex predator of more than 10 m in length.

Note that while a comparison to the anterior caudal vertebra of T. gurneyi is made, this comparison is not of much use as that caudal was found isolated and it is unknown what size Torvosaurus it belongs to. I therefore consider another relatively large and complete megalosaurid (Megalosaurus) to be a superior option for estimating the size of this specimen, and it is what will be used here.

For the Megalosaurus base: Our largest postcranial specimens can be estimated between 8 (Paleonerd01) and 9 (Thomas Holtz) meters long, depending on the tail length, and here I will be assuming the mean of that. They are also about 2 tonnes in mass, as was explained here. 

Some things should be noted, however:

-For this post, instead of my hyperlinked cross-scaled version, I will be using the original Megalosaurus skeletal by GetAwayTrike. This is because while the relative head and arm size in that skeletal are almost certainly too small for Megalosaurus itself, they are likely to be close to the mark for this megalosaurid because using my cross scaled version here results in an animal with an almost 2.3 meter long skull (significantly less parsimonious than the 185.3 cm estimate the original yields) as well as very large arms, which an >8 tonne megalosaurid would benefit significantly less from than a 2 tonne megalosaurid would.
TLDR: I expect this megalosaurid to be closer to GetAwayTrike's original skeletal in terms of arm and head size than to my cross scaling for Megalosaurus given the size disparity.

Onto its size: The largest anterior caudal in the hyperlinked Megalosaurus has a centrum 9.3 cm tall given the scalebar, substantially smaller than the 15 cm tall caudal centrum of MUJA-1913. Given everything above, this leads to a 13.7 meter long and 8.36 tonne animal with a robustly built 185.3 cm skull. Assuming this is roughly accurate, I consider this animal a much better choice for Europe's largest known carnivorous dinosaur than the Torvosaurus gurneyi holotype, and it would be among the largest known theropods of all, being very similar in size to more famous specimens like the 8.17 tonne Giganotosaurus holotype or the 7.9 tonne Sue. 

However, this does not mean that T. gurneyi itself isn't the largest known carnivorous dinosaur from Europe given known material. That may very well be the case.

Quote:Christophe Hendrickx wrote:

In this paragraph, Rauhut and colleagues wrote the following text:

Quote:"[...] Hendrickx & Mateus (2014) argued that the holotype of Torvosaurus guerneyi represented the largest theropod dinosaur yet recorded from Europe (see also specimens described by Malafaia et al., 2017a). This specimen includes a partial anterior caudal vertebra, the posterior articular surface of which is about 15% smaller than that of MUJA-1913. Thus, given that the specimen from the Vega Formation probably belongs to a closely related taxon, this specimen probably represents the largest theropod dinosaur recorded so far in Europe, and represents an apex predator of more than 10 m in length."

Given MUJA-1913's morphology, megalosaurid affinity, size and paleogeographic and stratigraphic distributions, I am sure that the authors would agree that this specimen could likely belong to Torvosaurus gurneyi itself and not automatically a closely related taxon.

Kind regards,

Christophe Hendrickx

Quote:Oliver Rauhut wrote:

Hi Christophe, Indeed, as we said on page 14: "Given that the genus Torvosaurus has been identified from the Late Jurassic of the Iberian Peninsula (Antunes & Mateus, 2003; Hendrickx & Mateus, 2014; Malafaia et al., 2017a), this vertebra might represent this taxon, but a positive generic or specific identification of this incomplete element is impossible." Thus, this moght very well be Torvosaurus gurneyi or another species of the genus Torvosaurus, but the material is still insufficient...

Hope this helps to clarify for all. Reply