Question 1

How do you say Wiehenvenator?

Accepted Answer

Say it like this: VEE-en-veh-NAY-tor. The tricky part is the start: VEE-en comes from the German place name Wiehengebirge, and the second half, veh-NAY-tor, is Latin for hunter. Put the stress on NAY. A good trick: say 'Vienna' but cut it short to 'VEE-en', then add 'veh-NAY-tor'. Practice it a few times and you will sound like a real paleontologist.

Question 2

What does Wiehenvenator mean?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator means Wiehen hunter. The Wiehen part refers to the Wiehengebirge hills in northwestern Germany, where the fossils were dug up. Venator is a Latin word meaning hunter, and it shows up in the names of lots of dinosaurs. The species name, albati, honors Rainer Albat, the amateur fossil collector who first spotted the bones. So the full name basically means the hunter from the Wiehen hills, discovered by Albat.

Question 3

How big was Wiehenvenator?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator was a genuinely massive dinosaur, estimated at around 9 meters (about 30 feet) long and weighing in the region of 900 kilograms or more. That makes it roughly as long as a city bus and heavier than most cars. For the Middle Jurassic period, about 161.5 million years ago, that made it one of the largest predators alive on Earth. It was significantly bigger than many of its contemporaries in Europe.

Question 4

What did Wiehenvenator eat?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator was a carnivore, a meat-eater through and through. As one of the top predators of its time and place, it almost certainly hunted large prey including sauropod dinosaurs and other plant-eaters that shared its coastal habitat. Its deep jaws and large serrated teeth were built for grabbing and tearing through flesh. Like most large predators, it probably also scavenged carcasses when the opportunity came up.

Question 5

Where did Wiehenvenator live?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator lived in what is now northwestern Germany, specifically in the region of the Wiehengebirge hills in Lower Saxony. But 161.5 million years ago, that part of the world looked completely different. Europe was a patchwork of tropical islands and shallow seas during the Middle Jurassic, and Wiehenvenator likely roamed coastal lowlands near the shores of an ancient sea. Its bones were actually found preserved in marine sediment, which tells us it lived very close to the water.

Question 6

When was Wiehenvenator discovered?

Accepted Answer

The fossils were first found by an amateur collector named Rainer Albat in the Wiehengebirge quarry region of Germany. However, Wiehenvenator was not formally named and described by scientists until 2016, when paleontologist Oliver Rauhut and his team published the official scientific paper. That makes Wiehenvenator one of the most recently named large Jurassic theropods from Europe, even though the fossils themselves are about 161.5 million years old.

Question 7

Is Wiehenvenator related to T. rex?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator and T. rex are both theropod dinosaurs, so they are distant cousins in the dinosaur family tree. But they belong to very different branches. Wiehenvenator was a megalosaurid, one of the oldest lineages of large meat-eating dinosaurs, while T. rex was a tyrannosaur that evolved much later. Wiehenvenator actually lived about 95 million years before T. rex appeared, and megalosaurids were already ancient by the time tyrannosaurs rose to dominance.

Question 8

What family does Wiehenvenator belong to?

Accepted Answer

Wiehenvenator belongs to the family Megalosauridae, one of the oldest and most historically important dinosaur families in science. Megalosaurids include Megalosaurus, which in 1824 became the very first dinosaur ever to receive a formal scientific name. Being in the same family as Megalosaurus makes Wiehenvenator part of a legendary dinosaur lineage. Within Megalosauridae, Wiehenvenator is placed in the subfamily Megalosaurinae, which contains the largest and most heavily built members of the family.

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