WWD: Iguanodon bernissartensis
Added 2023-05-24 07:34:10 +0000 UTCThe very second non-avian dinosaur to be scientifically named, this dinosaur was subject to some of the most infamous wastebasket taxon dumping ever. Over the course of two centuries, roughly twenty different species ranging from the Late Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous from three different continents have been assigned to the genus, although as of writing, most are now either reassigned to their own genera or have been rendered dubious, and only two are currently thought to actually belong to Iguanodon, and these are limited to the Barremian epoch of Western Europe.
So, this is the larger European species of Iguanodon featured in the episode, which was unspecified probably because the wastebasket status of the genus was not resolved at the time. In fact, I. bernissartensis wasn't designated as the type species until 2000, a year after WWD premiered (because the original type species, I. anglicus, was far too fragmentary to be diagnostic). In terms of anatomy, it combined the more gracile body shape of I. atherfieldensis (later put in its own genus, Mantellisaurus) with the large size of I bernissartensis.
Although, for a series that tends to use the largest and most spectacular measurement estimates for taxa, they really lowballed it. Rather than merely being 'three tonnes a piece', large Iguanodon probably approached five metric tonnes, making them one of the largest ornithopods up until the evolution of larger hadrosaurs near the end of the Late Cretaceous (for the sake of this size chart, I chose a measurement closer to the average for the species, just so it wouldn't absolutely dwarf nearly every other animal present, although it still does).
