Megalosaurus

Megalosaurus was a genus of large carnivorous theropod dinosaurs of the Middle Jurassic period (Bathonian stage, 166 million years ago). The first fossils were found in 1676 in Oxfordshire in what is now Southern England.
The first naturalists who investigated Megalosaurus mistook it for a gigantic lizard of twenty metres length – hence its name meaning “Great Lizard”. They portrayed it as what can resemble the now living comodo dragons; large dinosaurs walking heavily on all four legs. It was later discovered that Megalosaurus was about 7 metres long and weighing about 1.1 tonnes. It was bipedal, walking on stout hindlimbs, its horizontal torso balanced by a horizontal tail. Its forelimbs were short, though very robust. Megalosaurus had a rather large head, equipped with long curved teeth. It was generally a robust and heavily muscled animal. It most likely had proto-feathers. Megalosaurus was the first genus of non-avian dinosaur to be validly named in 1824. It was perhaps also the first dinosaur, apart from modern birds, to be described in the scientific literature, with a published illustration of a femur bone in 1676 by Robert Plot. At the time, Robert Plot correctly identified the bone as a femur, but incorrectly described it as a  Roman war elephant, as the bone was too large to belong to any living species known to be found in England at the time.

A fossilized tooth from a theropod was found at the island of Bornholm. Our scientific supervisor - Jesper Milan - suggested the we should make a Megalosaur. John Sibbick made some sketches of the beast and the positioning of it. Jakob Vinther supervised the proto feathering.

Søren Buus made a digital model and sliced it up and constructed it "the old fashioned way" from PU foam covered with a layer of fiberglass reinforced acrylic gypsum.

To make the proto feathers we bought stretchable artificial fur made with hairs from Yak. We ordered a very loose and open fur and we painted between the hairs to give it a nasty predator look.

The head was sculpted and cast from a flexible poly urethan that we could punch hairs into. The creature was styled by a theatre hairdresser. With the hand made eyes and teeth it got the aggressive look that we wanted to give it.