Baryonyx

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Baryonyx was a large predatory dinosaur built along very different lines from most other big theropods. Its skull was long, low and narrow, with a distinct kink in the snout and a rosette of enlarged teeth at the tip, strikingly similar to the jaws of a modern gharial. The jaws held roughly 96 teeth — about twice as many as in Tyrannosaurus — and they were conical, slightly recurved and finely serrated, better suited to gripping slippery prey than to slicing off great chunks of flesh. Its most famous feature is the huge hand claw, around 25 centimetres long along the outer curve, which gives the animal its name: "heavy claw". The body was held horizontally, balanced by a long stiff tail, the neck was straighter and less S-curved than in other large theropods, and the forelimbs were unusually powerful for a biped. The back vertebrae carried moderately tall neural spines, a modest hint of the towering sail seen in its relative Spinosaurus.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Baryonyx lived in the Early Cretaceous, during the Barremian stage roughly 130–125 million years ago, in what is now southern England. The holotype was discovered in 1983 in the Smokejacks Pit clay quarry near Ockley in Surrey, in sediments of the Weald Clay Formation. The setting was a broad, low-lying floodplain crossed by meandering rivers and dotted with shallow lakes, marshes and drier patches covered in ferns, cycads and conifers. The waters teemed with fish, turtles and crocodile relatives, while herbivores such as Iguanodon and Mantellisaurus browsed the plains. Additional remains attributed to Baryonyx or close spinosaurid relatives have been reported from the Isle of Wight and from Cretaceous beds in Spain and Portugal, suggesting that these fish-eating predators ranged widely across the subtropical coastal lowlands of western Europe.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy