Megalosaurus by Moondawg

Megalosaurus (meaning "Great Lizard", from Greek,megalo- meaning 'big', 'tall' or 'great' and sauros meaning 'lizard') is a genus of large meat-eating theropod dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic Period (Bathonian) o

Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur to be described. Part of a bone was recovered from a limestone quarry at Cornwell near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England in 1676. The fragment was sent to Robert Plot, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and first curator of the Ashmolean Museum, who published a description in his Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677. He correctly identified the bone as the lower extremity of the femur of a large animal and he recognized that it was too large to belong to any known species; he considered it to be the thigh bone of a giant. The bone has since been lost but the illustration is detailed enough to identify it clearly as the femur of a Megalosaurus.

The Cornwell bone was described again by Richard Brookes in 1763. He named it Scrotum humanum, while describing its similar appearance to a pair of human testicles. The label was not considered to be a "name" for the animal in question at the time, and was not used in subsequent literature. Technically, the name was published after the advent of binomial nomenclature, and although this name theoretically had priority over Megalosaurus, the rules of the ICZN state that if a name falls into disuse for 50 years after publication, it is no longer in competition for priority. Therefore, the name Scrotum humanum is a nomen oblitum, or "forgotten name".

More discoveries were made, starting in 1815, again at the Stonesfield quarry. They were acquired by William Buckland, Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford and dean of Christ Church. He did not know to what animal the bones belonged but, in 1818, after the Napoleonic Wars, the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier visited Buckland in Oxford and realised that the bones belonged to a giant lizard-like creature. Buckland then published descriptions of the bones in Transactions of the Geological Society, in 1824 (Physician James Parkinson had described them in an article in 1822).