Iguanodon

The featured image is my illustration of the Crystal Palace Iguanodon in head-on view, painted in acrylic watercolours in 1982. To accompany it, I have set a slideshow consisting of a gallery of alternative renderings of the same subject plus a couple of photographic online references including some paleontological representations and reconstructions both traditional and updated.

The slideshow is listed as follows:

Iguanodon in Pale Blue highlight
Iguanodon against Blue Sky backdrop
Iguanodon Portrait
Iguanodon bernissartesis
Crystal Palace Iguanodons
Iguanodons in bright sunlight
Bernie Sartensis
Iguanodon in Pale Green tint
Traditional Iguanodon Image
Updated Iguanodon Reconstruction
An Iguanodon Herd
Bernie’s Gurning Profile

Dave Draper September 2014

In popular culture

Since its description in 1825, Iguanodon has been a feature of worldwide popular culture. Two lifesize reconstructions of Mantellodon * [considered Iguanodon at the time – see footnote at page bottom] built at the Crystal Palace in London in 1852 greatly contributed to the popularity of the genus. Their thumb spikes were mistaken for horns, and they were depicted as elephant-like quadrupeds, yet this was the first time an attempt was made at constructing full-size dinosaur models. In 1910 Heinrich Harder portrayed a group of Iguanodon in the classic German collecting cards about extinct and prehistoric animals, Tierre der Urwelt.

Several motion pictures have featured Iguanodon. In the Disney film Dinosaur, an Iguanodon named Aladar served as the protagonist with three other iguanodonts as other main characters; a loosely related ride of the same name at Disney’s Animal Kingdom is based around bringing an Iguanodon back to the present. Iguanodon is one of the three dinosaur genera that inspired Godzilla; the other two were Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus. Iguanodon has also made appearances in some of the many Land Before Time films, as well as episodes of the television series.

Aside from appearances in movies, Iguanodon has also been featured on the television documentary miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs [1999] produced by the BBC, and played a starring role in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, The Lost World as well as featuring in an episode of the Discovery Channel documentary, Dinosaur Planet. It also was present in Bob Bakker’s Raptor Red [1995], as a Utahraptor prey item. A main belt asteroid, 1989 CB3, has been named 9941 Iguanodon in honour of the genus.

Because it is both one of the first dinosaurs described and one of the best-known dinosaurs, Iguanodon has been well placed as a barometer of changing public and scientific perceptions on dinosaurs. Its reconstructions have gone through three stages: the elephantine quadrupedal horn-snouted reptile satisfied the Victorians, then a bipedal but still fundamentally reptilian animal using its tail to prop itself up dominated the early 20th century, but was slowly overturned during the 1960s by its current, more agile and dynamic representation, able to shift from two legs to all fours.

Iguanodon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iguanodon [i-gwah-nə-don]; meaning iguana-tooth is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that existed roughly halfway between the first of the swift bipedal hypsilophodontids of the mid-Jurassic and the duck-billed dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous. While many species have been classified in the genus Iguanodon, dating from the late Jurassic Period to the late Cretaceous Period of Asia, Europe, and North America, research in the first decade of the 21st century suggests that there is only one well-substantiated species: Iguanodon bernissartensis **, which lived from the late Barremian to the earliest Aptian ages [Early Cretaceous] in Belgium and possibly elsewhere in Europe, between about 126 and 125 million years ago. Iguanodon were large, bulky herbivores. Distinctive features include large thumb spikes, which were possibly used for defence against predators, combined with long prehensile fifth fingers able to forage for food.

The genus was named in 1825 by English geologist Gideon Mantell * [see footnote] based on fossil specimens that are now assigned to different genera and species. Iguanodon was the second type of dinosaur formally named based on fossil specimens, after Megalosaurus. Together with Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus, it was one of the three genera originally used to define Dinosauria. The genus Iguanodon belongs to the larger group Iguanodontia, along with the duck-billed hadrosaurs. The taxonomy of this genus continues to be a topic of study as new species are named or long-standing ones reassigned to other genera.

Scientific understanding of Iguanodon has evolved over time as new information has been obtained from fossils. The numerous specimens of this genus, including nearly complete skeletons from two well-known bonebeds, have allowed researchers to make informed hypotheses regarding many aspects of the living animal, including feeding, movement, and social behaviour. As one of the first scientifically well-known dinosaurs, Iguanodon has occupied a small but notable place in the public’s perception of dinosaurs, its artistic representation changing significantly in response to new interpretations of its remains.

Classification and origins
Main article: Iguanodontia

Iguanodon gives its name to the unranked clade Iguanodontia, a very populous group of ornithopods with many species known from the Middle Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous. Aside from Iguanodon, the best-known members of the clade include Dryosaurus, Camptosaurus, Ouranosaurus, and the duck-bills, or hadrosaurs. In older sources, Iguanodontidae was shown as a distinct family. This family traditionally has been something of a wastebasket taxon, including ornithopods that were neither hypsilophodontids nor hadrosaurids.

In practice, animals like Callovosaurus, Camptosaurus, Craspedodon, Kangnasaurus, Mochlodon, Muttaburrasaurus, Ouranosaurus, and Probactrosaurus were usually assigned to this family. With the advent of cladistic analyses, Iguanodontidae as traditionally construed was shown to be paraphyletic *** and these animals are recognised to fall at different points in relation to hadrosaurs on a cladogram, instead of in a single distinct clade ****.

Essentially, the modern concept of Iguanodontidae currently includes only Iguanodon. Groups like Iguanodontoidea are still used as unranked clades in the scientific literature, though many traditional iguanodontids are now included in the superfamily Hadrosauroidea. Iguanodon lies between Camptosaurus and Ouranosaurus in cladograms, and is probably descended from a camptosaur-like animal. At one point, Jack Horner [pictured online on set in Jurassic 3] suggested, based mostly on skull features, that hadrosaurids actually formed two more distantly related groups, with Iguanodon on the line to the flat-headed hadrosaurines, and Ouranosaurus.

Dave Draper September 2014

* The genus was named in 1825 by English geologist Gideon Mantell
* Mantellodon [considered Iguanodon at the time]
** Iguanodon bernissartensis [recent research suggests that this is the only well-substantiated species]

*** paraphyletic
[of a group of organisms] descended from a common evolutionary ancestor or ancestral group, but not including all the descendant groups.

**** clade (ORIGIN 1950s: from Greek klados ‘branch’
a group of organisms believed to have evolved from a common ancestor, according to the principles of cladistics: (classification of organisms in relation to ancestry).

Iguanodon is located under Wildlife

Dave Draper September 2014

VNotes