Metriacanthosaurus Dinosaur

Metriacanthosaurus is a medium-sized theropod poorly represented by fossil discoveries that lived in England and in the United Kingdom about 160 million years ago during the Upper Jurassic period. This dinosaur is known only from a few bones found in the 19th century at Oxford Clay formation in England, near Jordan's Cliff in Weymouth, by a certain individual named W. Parker: a part of the hip, a femur as well as some dorsal vertebrae.

It is roughly estimated that the holotype specimen of Metriacanthosaurus was about 6 meters long and weighed around 2000 lbs (1 ton).

Origin of the name and classification

In the 1920s, German paleontologist Friedrich von Huene examined Parker's fossils and then wrote a paper about carnivorous dinosaurs from Jurassic and Cretaceous Europe. In this work, von Huene first attributes the bones to a new species of Megalosaurus, Megalosaurus parkeri. Nearly ten years later, von Huene retracts himself and decides to classify the remains as an Altispinax species, Altispinax parkeri.

It was not until 1964 that the name Metriacanthosaurus was given to this dinosaur after researcher Alick Walker noticed that the fossils are vastly different from those of Altispinax. The name Metriacanthosaurus, which means "moderately spined lizard", refers to the backbone of this dinosaur whose neural spines height is halfway between that of typical theropods such as Megalosaurus and that of high neural spines dinosaurs such as Altispinax.

Metriacanthosaurus is now considered to be a species of allosaurid sinraptor related to the Asian dinosaur Yangchuanosaurus.