Torvosaurus is one of the largest carnivores of the Jurassic and is likely the largest of the megalosaurids. It was a successful genus, surviving throughout all of the Late Jurassic and two species have been found in North America, Europe and possibly Africa. It co-existed alongside other Jurassic superstars such as Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus, but despite all this, we don't know much about the savage lizard. As usual, to garner a better understanding of an extinct animal, we need to speculate with what we have and I will be using the North American species, Torvosaurus tanneri, as we have better fossil evidence for its behavior. T. tanneri is known from none other than the Morrison formation and while it is known from Wyoming, it is best known from the Dry Mesa quarry of southwest Colorado.
Dry Mesa is one of the many drought induced sites of the Morrison and, as usual, Allosaurus dominates the site with an absurd 62% of the recovered theropods being comprised of just Allosaurus. Allosaurus is able to dominate these sites due to both its size (as its only outsized by Torvosaurus) and its sheer abundance at the Morrison. Our topic of today, Torvosaurus, is the third most common component of the quarry as it makes up 10% of the theropods. Right off the bat this communicates something to us, as despite Torvo's much larger body mass, it is still getting out-competed at the quarry by Allosaurus. No this does not mean that Torvo was a "worse dinosaur" than Allosaurus, but this does indicate that the savage lizard was an uncommon and elusive theropod, just like all of the other Morrison theropods that are not Allosaurus. The reasoning behind this rareness could be the simple fact that Torvosaurus required massive territorial ranges, which is consistent with modern day apex carnivores.
If this assumption is true, then its a no-brainer that the animal was territorial and likely spent much of its time patrolling its massive territory (similar to how we speculate T-rex would've lived). Territorial battles could've been settled via face biting (similar to tyrannosaurs and its contemporary, Allosaurus) or wrestling matches in a somewhat similar way to modern Komodo dragons which would've been fully possible due to those short yet robust arms. Speaking of those arms, they likely had some purpose in restraining prey (although the jaws would've been favored) which is implied through their robust design and large claws. But what prey was Torvo
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I just got confirmation the images and video I posted earlier of a Torvosaurus walking around in JWE (that were soon taken down by a moderator for some reason) were a mod and nothing official, wanted to get that out there
