Agrosaurus Seeley, 1891

Agrosaurus Seeley, 1891 "wild country lizard" or "hunting lizard"
AG-ro-SAWR-us (Gr. agro- "rural, wild" (from agros "open country, rural land") or "hunting" (from agra "hunting"); both derivations for agro- are found in Greek: agrostes "country dweller" or "hunter"; syagros "wild boar" or "hunter of boars") + Gr. sauros "lizard") (m) for remains of a dinosaur H. Seeley mistakenly thought came from Australia. Seeley did not provide a derivation for the name, which may allude to the then unsettled region of northern Queensland, Australia, where the type specimen supposedly was found in 1844 by members of the HMS Fly expedition, or to the dinosaur's supposed meat-eating habits, indicated by "two laterally compressed claw-phalanges...of the type usual in carnivorous reptiles." Seeley described Agrosaurus as a "theropod" related to Massospondylus-- prosauropods were still thought to be carnivores at the time. Recent research (Vickers-Rich, Rich, McNamara & Milner, 1999; Benton, Juul, Storrs & Galton, 2000) indicates that the type material was in fact found in Durdham Down, Bristol, England, was mislabeled, and actually belongs to the British dinosaur Thecodontosaurus antiquus [= Thecodontosaurus] [revised 5/2000]

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