Afrovenator

Afrovenator is an african theropod dinosaur that lived during Early Cretaceous Period. Its name means "African Hunter". Approaching 8 meters long and weighing 1 ton, it was deadly predator. Fossil remains for this dinosaur have been found in Africa, Niger.




First almost complete skeleton of Afrovenator was found in 1933 by an amateur fossil hunter. The dinosaur was medium sized and buiult for a life of an active predator. Strong arms designed for catching and holding a prey while sharp teeth kill the prey. Most analyses place Afrovenator within Megalosauridae, which was formerly a "wastebasket family" which contained many large and hard-to-classify theropods, but has since been redefined in a meaningful way, as a sister taxon to the family Spinosauridae within the Megalosauroidea.


A 2002 analysis, focused mainly on the noasaurids, found Afrovenator to be a basal megalosaurid. However, it did not include Dubreuillosaurus (formerly Poekilopleuron valesdunesis), which could affect the results in that region of the cladogram (Carrano et al. 2002). Other recent, more complete, cladistic analyses show Afrovenator in a subfamily of Megalosauridae with Eustreptospondylus and Dubreuillosaurus. This subfamily is either called Megalosaurinae (Allain 2002) or Eustreptospondylinae (Holtz et al. 2004). The latter study also includes Piatnitzkysaurus in this subfamily.
A few alternative hypotheses have been presented for Afrovenator's relationships.
In Sereno's original description, Afrovenator was found to be a basal spinosauroid (he uses the name "Torvosauroidea"), outside of Spinosauridae and Megalosauridae (which he calls "Torvosauridae") (Sereno et al. 1994). Finally, another recent study places Afrovenator outside of Megalosauroidea completely, and instead finds it more closely related to Allosaurus (Rauhut 2003). This is the only study to draw this conclusion.