🦖 Dinosaurs🦖 TheropodCretaceousWell known
Baryonyx
Baryonyx walkeri
Baryonyx was the first good evidence that some large theropods ate fish, and it helped to make sense of the strange spinosaurids.
Image: ★Kumiko★ · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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Characteristics
- Scientific name
- Baryonyx walkeri
- Period
- Early Cretaceous (Barremian)
- Lived
- 130–125 Ma (130 million years ago)
- Diet
- Piscivore
- Habitat
- Freshwater, Swamp
- Length (estimate)
- 8.5 m
- Mass (estimate)
- 1,700 kg
- Discovered/described
- 1983 · William Walker (amateur collector)
Description
Baryonyx was a spinosaurid predatory dinosaur with a long, crocodile-like snout full of fine teeth and a huge claw on its thumb. The stomach region of the first skeleton contained fish scales and bones of a young Iguanodon. Its discovery by an amateur in a clay pit in 1983 was a sensational British dinosaur find.
Habitat
Rivers and marshy plains of the Wealden region of southern England.
Fossil sites
Smokejacks clay pit, Surrey
Weald Clay Formation
Cultural profile: United Kingdom →
Contemporaries in the database
Sources: Baryonyx