Buckland's Big Lizard

 

Megalosaurus, once a staple in every dinosaur book or publication you could find, has been gradually overshadowed by other, better known predatory dinosaurs, to the point that it is very rarely mentioned nowadays in dinosaur books and related media. There may be many reasons for that, but the main one is probably that, almost 200 years after it was initially described, it is still a very poorly known dinosaur due to the scarce remains available. Soon after its discovery in England in the early 19^th century, the genus became a sort of “wastebasket taxon” into which pretty much any other theropod dinosaur from anywhere in the world was thrown. Because of this, at one point more than 40 different species of theropod dinosaurs were assigned to the genus Megalosaurus, with some notable ones later reclassified as the now much better known Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Torvosaurus, Eustreptospondylus, Dryptosaurus and Dilophosaurus, among many others. Once the genus was properly “cleaned-up” of all other clearly distinct animals, there really wasn’t much left to work with.

 

Some of the known material of M. bucklandii on display at OU Museum of Natural History (Wikimedia Commons).

When English theologian and biologist William Buckland described and named Megalosaurus in 1824, he was unaware of what a dinosaur was, as no such thing had been defined by science yet. He only had a bunch of incomplete skeletal remains that belonged to a creature that he correctly identified as an unusually big reptile, with limb bones closer in shape to those of mammals and birds. Having never seen anything like it, and assuming it was an extinct creature, he imagined it as a quadrupedal, bulky giant lizard with straight legs and a posture similar to that of a lion. And that’s how reconstructions from that era portray it. At the time, having only living reptiles as a reference, and with Megalosaurus’ remains being rather fragmentary, there was no reason to believe it could have been a bipedal creature. It was with later discoveries of other, more complete specimens of similar theropod dinosaurs like Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus and the more closely related Torvosaurus that a better picture of Megalosaurus could be painted by extrapolating. That is why we now know that it had a fairly typical body plan for a theropod dinosaur, walking on its hind legs with its back close to parallel to the ground and its arms free to assist in hunting prey.

Megalosaurus depicted as a quadruped, the way it was envisioned by science in the early 19th Century. Drawn by me back in 2010.

My childhood's Megalosaurus, as it was portrayed on David Lambert's A Field Guide to Dinosaurs from 1983.

In 1842, eighteen years after Buckland’s description of his Big Lizard, biologist Sir Richard Owen used it, together with the herbivore Iguanodon and the now obscure ankylosaur Hylaeosaurus, to define a new group of big, extinct reptiles, and coined the word Dinosauria (“terrible lizards”, or “fearfully great reptiles”) to name them. And since then, Megalosaurus has been retroactively recognized as the first dinosaur to ever be named and described by science. Its relevance comes more from that fact than from what is directly known from the animal itself.

While scarce remains are indeed a problem for paleontologists, from an artist’s point of view they are an opportunity to exercise one’s imagination to compensate for the holes in the actual data. They give the artist more freedom in the way they can visualize and depict long lost creatures, sometimes trading accuracy for aesthetics and evocative power. Which brings me to my Megalosaurus piece from 2007 that’s above this text. It was made for my unpublished book on dinosaurs and, truth be told, it was already problematic back then. I wanted to depict Megalosaurus the way I always imagined it from older depictions in the dinosaur books of my childhood, only updated. But I later saw that I was too lax in my approach, somewhat abusing that artistic freedom that I just mentioned. For a start, the creature’s “arms” and “hands” are terribly wrong in their posture. Just like the Raptors in Jurassic Park, it has what is jokingly called “bunny hands” in the paleoart world, which was a common trope in dinosaur art until the early 2000s. In reality, no theropod dinosaur could place its hands that way. Its palms should face each other at the animal’s sides, with the arms folded like a bird’s wings. That thing alone dates the drawing incredibly, and in fact it was already considered wrong at the time it was made. Also, despite my intent in making it look like a generic Allosauroid theropod (or “Carnosaur”, like they were commonly called back in the 1980s and 1990s), just like those older depictions did, I somehow managed to make it more closely resemble a Carcharodontosaur instead (probably Giganotosaurus would be the closest match), to the point that I now think that’s what anyone with some knowledge of paleontology would assume it is by looking at it. And yet, I still like it enough. I think the dinosaur manages to look quite bird-like despite its shortcomings, and that foot on the dead baby sauropod is something I am proud of having thought of, for some reason. As for said baby sauropod, I honestly don’t really know what it is. Maybe a Cetiosaurus? It could very well be. Whatever the case, I see this piece as my humble tribute to one of the dinosaurs that populate my childhood memories, one that seems to have been gradually forgotten or, at least, relegated to a secondary role in today’s dinosaur books. Which is not necessarily bad, as there are certainly many better known theropods which can be more precisely reconstructed from more complete remains, but it’s still somewhat sad for those of us who grew up having it in our private dinosaur gallery, still hosted inside our childlike minds.

 

That's it for today. Take care and see you all very soon.

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