“T-Rex is closer in time to us than it was to Megalosaurus. And I'll repeat that because I think this is one of these facts that it still blows my mind studying dinosaurs.”

In Our Time (BBC) · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

Context

Paleontologist Steve Brusatte is setting the scene of the Middle Jurassic, around 166 million years ago, when Megalosaurus lived. He stresses how much earlier it was than the dinosaurs most people know.

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Transcript

In Our Time (BBC) Around 21:20 into the episode

Speaker 4

…those animals. And also earlier than that as well, we've got dinosaurs going back to probably around 200 million years. So if you think about that timeframe, there's a huge amount of time that's elapsed even since the origin of dinosaurs. And then between Megalosaurus and then things like T-Rex.

Misha Glenny

And that's extraordinary to contemplate the extent of that period. So we're right in the middle with the Megalosaurus, which is the Middle Jurassic. In the Middle Jurassic, as you said. Steve, can you describe to us what the world looked like in the Middle Jurassic period?

Steve Brusatte

The Middle Jurassic, as Emily said, is a long time ago. T-Rex is closer to us than it was to Megalosaurus. And I'll repeat that because I think this is one of these facts that it still blows my mind studying dinosaurs. T-Rex is closer in time to us than it was to Megalosaurus. So back in the Middle Jurassic, the supercontinent of Pangea, which had once existed, all of the land had been gathered together into this one giant slab that stretched from the North Pole to the South Pole. That supercontinent had begun to split apart about 200 million years ago, but it was just beginning to fracture. So the modern continents were beginning to take shape, and you had these very narrow oceans in between. And there was this sliver of an ocean that was the proto-Atlantic. And in that ocean was a series of islands, including some islands that now are parts of what would be Britain. You know, it was a different shaped island. It's not like modern Britain was the same…

Misha Glenny

Emma Nicholls wanted to ask you that what else have we got in the Middle Jurassic period apart from the Megalosaurus?

Speaker 4

Well, so in the Middle Jurassic of Oxfordshire, for example, where the type specimens are from and where we also have trackways of Megalosaurus as well, we know that we had other dinosaurs such as Eustreptospondylus, which is a dinosaur a lot like Megalosaurus, closely related, a little bit…

Misha Glenny

So Emily, Buckland, we mentioned earlier he referred to it as a four-legged lizard, I think. How much did Buckland get right about Megalosaurus? And what have we learnt about the beasts since?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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