Acro=high, cantho=spine, saurus=lizard, atokeness=from Atoka

Early to Mid-Cretaceous Period, 125-110 million years old.

40 feet long
Found in McCurtain County Ok. in 1983

Acrocanthosaurus is the largest meat eating dinosaur known from North America during the middle Cretaceous times. It predates the similarily-sized Tyannosaurus rex by 40 million years. The speciese was originally described in 1950 by University of Oklahoma paleontologiest J. Willis Stovall and Wan Langston, who had recovered a few bones, including vertebrae with the long spines, in nearby Atoka County Oklahoma and named the dinosaur.

While Other remains were subsequently found in Texas, the discovery of the McCurtain County specimen, with its near-complete skull, helped redefine Acrocanthosaurus as a member of the allosaur family. Related species include the African dinosaur Carcharodontosaurus from the same time period (middle Cretaceous), and Allosaurus from the early Jurassic Period, 206-144 million years old.

Other Acrocanthosaurus specimens have since been found in Utah, and perhaps Maryland.