The story
Spinosaurus aegyptiacus lived about 100 to 94 million years ago in the river systems of what is now North Africa. Ernst Stromer, a German paleontologist, described the first skeleton from Bahariya Oasis in Egypt in 1915, but the fossils were destroyed when Allied bombs hit the Munich museum in 1944. New bones from the Kem Kem beds of Morocco, described by Nizar Ibrahim and colleagues in 2014 and 2020, show a body up to about 14 m long, a sail of tall spines on the back, a long crocodile-like snout and conical teeth for catching fish.
The 2020 find of a paddle-like tail, with tall neural spines, suggested that it swam by undulating. How much time Spinosaurus spent in water is debated: some researchers argue that it was a wading hunter, others that dense bones let it dive. Either way it was a river predator that shared its habitat with giant fish, crocodile relatives and other big predators such as Carcharodontosaurus.
Why it mattered
- Spinosaurus showed that large dinosaurs could hunt in water, widening the picture of dinosaur lifestyles.
- Its story, from lost museum bones to new Moroccan fossils, is a model of how fossils can be recovered and reinterpreted.
- It shows dinosaurs adapting to fishing niches usually held by crocodilians.
Sources
- The Strange Saga of Spinosaurus, the Semiaquatic Dinosaurian Superpredator Carnegie Museum of Natural History
- New paper suggests Spinosaurus may have been aquatic Harvard Gazette
- Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur Nature (Ibrahim et al. 2020)
Contested history
Consensus: Spinosaurus was a large fish-eating dinosaur adapted to water, but how far it swam is still contested.
- Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur Nature (Ibrahim et al. 2020)
- New paper suggests Spinosaurus may have been aquatic Harvard Gazette
- Spinosaurus is not an aquatic dinosaur eLife (Sereno et al. 2022)
- Spinosaurus not aquatic University of Chicago
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