Eustreptospondylus oxoniensis was a meat-eating theropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic of England, living about 163 million years ago. Its skeleton was found in 1870 in a brick pit at Summertown, on the northern edge of Oxford, in the marine Oxford Clay. For decades it was treated as a species of Megalosaurus or Streptospondylus, until the British palaeontologist Alick Walker gave it its own name in 1964. That name means “well-curved vertebrae”, and oxoniensis means “from Oxford”.

The Oxford skeleton is from an animal that was not fully grown and measures about 4.6 metres long. Adults were probably larger, perhaps six metres or more. It was a megalosaurid, a lightly built relative of Megalosaurus, with a long, low skull, strong three-fingered arms and a stiff tail for balance.

The skeleton is still on display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Because it was buried at sea, palaeontologists think it lived on the coast of one of the islands that made up Jurassic Europe, hunting smaller dinosaurs and pterosaurs and picking over the carcasses of marine reptiles washed up on the beach.