I Know Dino Podcast: Torvosaurus Gurneyi

Episode 16 is all about Torvosaurus Gurneyi, one the biggest, baddest carnivores in modern day Portugal.

You can listen to our free podcast, with all our episodes, on iTunes at:

In this episode, we discuss:

The dinosaur of the day: Torvosaurus gurney, which means “savage lizard”
Torvosaurus gurneyi is named after the paleo-artist James Gurney, who created Dinotopia (published in 1992)

Torvosaurus gurneyi is a new species found in Portugal, which lived on the Iberian Peninsula (now Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and parts of France), about 150 million years ago (Jurassic)
Torvosaurus was dug up in 2003 (an amateur paleontologist found part of a jawbone). They also found the shinbone, teeth, and parts of the tail vertebrae
Christophe Hendrickx, who was a Ph.D. student at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, discovered Torvosaurus gurneyi when studying what scientists thought were the bones of Torvosaurus tanneri (related species, but lived in North America’s Rocky Mountains in the Jurassic)

Study was published in PLOS ONE in March 2014
Now there are two species of Torvosaurus, Torvosaurus tanneri and Torvosaurus gurneyi
Torvosaurus tanneri was named in 1979. Large, heavy, bipedal carnivore that could grow to 33 feet (one of the largest of its time)

But some key differences (between Torvosaurus gueryni and Torvosaurus tanneri): Torvosaurus gueryni upper jaw had fewer teeth, bone and tail vertebrae also looked different
Torvosaurus tanneri had more than 11 teeth (Torvosaurus gurneyi has less than 11); the mouth bones also have different shapes
Torvosaurus gurneyi had four-inch long teeth that were blade-shaped, with sharp claws on its forearms to rip into prey

It was 32 feet long
The ecosystem where Torvosaurus lived was probably like the Serengeti. According to Holtz, there were a lot of small, medium, and large carnivores living alongside each other, just like lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, and jackals live alongside each other
Lourinhã, Portugal, where Torvosaurus was found has a lot of fossils (lots of cliffs over a shoreline). In the Jurassic, it had a large river and lots of vegetation, and diverse set of dinosaurs

May have been the biggest predator in Europe (at least so far)
Torvosaurus gurneyi probably grew so big because it was surrounded by so many herbivores (stegosaurs and sauropods)
Torvosaurus probably hunted large prey, but may also have been a scavenger

Torvosaurus gurneyi was smaller than T.rex, but still had a powerful bite
Torvosaurus gueryni lived about 80 million years before T-rex
According to paleontologist Thomas R. Holtz Jr., Torvosaurus was a “big bruiser predator” meaning it used brute force to kill prey, instead of speed or surprise

Torvosaurus probably took a big bite out of prey and waited for it to bleed to death (compared to T-rex that may have crushed prey with its jaws)
The Torvosaurus discovery changes the way scientists view dinosaurs in Europe during the Jurassic. Before, it was thought that most of the dinosaurs there were dwarf size, evolving smaller to live on the many islands that formed Europe back then
Torvosaurus gurneyi was part of the group megalosaurs

Huxley named the family Megalosauridae in 1869
It was a “wastebasket” group, meaning it included a large variety of unrelated species (Dryptosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Indosaurus, Velociraptor)
Lived in the mid to late Jurassic about 170-148 Ma

Thomas R. Holtz offered an alternate group definition as all dinosaurs more closely related to Megalosaurus than to Spinosaurus, Allosaurus, or modern birds
Also sometimes called Torvosauridae
They are primative theropods; small to large sized, with sharp teeth and had three claws on each hand

Big predators are usually harder to find than prey, so not much is known about megalosaurs
But, megalosaurus did look similar to T-rex, and may have been covered in proto-feathers
Fun fact: 108 dinosaur species have been found in Britain, so far. During the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, Britain was a “land bridge” between North America and Eurasia, so a lot of dinosaurs migrated and evolved around there (including Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Neovenator, Eotyrannus, and Cetiosaurus

I Know Dino Podcast: Torvosaurus Gurneyi (Episode 16)