Gigantosaurus

giant lizard

• gigas / gigantos · Greek · giant
• sauros · Greek · lizard

The name combines the Greek words for "giant" and "lizard", so it simply means "giant lizard". Seeley gave it to huge limb bones from England that he thought came from an enormous reptile. The name is often confused with Giganotosaurus, the large Argentinian theropod, which is a different animal.

Named by

Seeley

Year named

1869

Period

Late Jurassic

Stage

Kimmeridgian

Found in

Kimmeridge Clay, Cambridgeshire, England

The type species, G. megalonyx, is based on scrappy sauropod material and is generally treated as a nomen dubium. Fraas later used the name again in 1908 for other species from Germany and Tanzania, which are now assigned to other genera such as Plateosaurus and Tornieria. Do not confuse it with Giganotosaurus (Coria and Salgado, 1995).