Iguanodon
Iguanodon anglicusi
Pronounced:
ih - Gwan - o - don
Diet:
Herbivore (Plant-Eater)
Name Means:
"Lizard Tooth"
Length: 33
feet (10 m)
Height: 12
feet (3.6 m)
Weight: 5 ton
(4,500 kilos)
Time: Early
Cretaceous - 110 mya
Fossil remains for this Dinosaur
have been found in England, Africa, U.S.
Iguanodon has become quite famous as a result
of its starring role in Dinosaur, but before
that it helped people understand what dinosaurs
really looked like. It was one of the first
complete skeletons ever found. This allowed
scientists who had never seen a complete
dinosaur, to figure out what it would have
looked like in life. In fact, the first time
this common dinosaur was found as just a partial
skeleton, scientists put its thumb spike on its
nose!
This was only the second dinosaur to be
described, after
Megalosaurus Its teeth were discovered
in the early 1820's in England - these original
fossils were "rediscovered" in the British
Museum in 1977. As nothing like it had ever been
described in scientific literature, the teeth of
this creature were a puzzle that an amateur
paleontologist named Gideon Mantell solved by
comparing them to the teeth of living animals.
Mantell found that the teeth looked like those
of a modern iguana and named it Iguanodon. He
speculated that it was a huge extinct version of
this modern reptile. It was in 1878 in a coal
mine in Belgium that 24 fairly complete and
articulated specimens were found. Although they
were of a larger species, they clearly showed
what this creature looked like in life. |
