Its fossil, holotype BMNH 42997 (now NHM R 42997), a part of a right femur, 312 mm long, was found in the Netherlands near Maastricht, and originally described as a new species of Megalosaurus in 1883 by Harry Seeley: M. bredai, honouring the late Dutch biologist and geologist Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda, a director of the Teylers Museum, who had collected the fossil at some time between 1820 and 1860 from the chalkstone quarry at the St Pietersberg.
At Franeker he became close personal friends with one of the curators, the Dutch lawyer, administrator and politician Squire Adriaan Gillis Camper, himself the son of professor of anatomy Petrus Camper.
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In the latter function he researched in the field of magnetism and electricity and also bought many fossils, among them the Haarlem specimen of Archaeopteryx.
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Here he was head of the local hortus botanicus and in 1825 commenced a major botanical work, the Genera et Species Orchidearum et Asclepiadearum, in fifteen tomes describing plant genera from the Dutch Indies shipped to him from Batavia; but he had to abandon this project and his position in 1830 because of the Belgian Revolution.
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