Since 2001 and after its appearance in the movie Jurassic Park III , Spinosaurus is one of the most famous dinosaurs. And in fact, it is even the subject of heated discussions among fans of the saga. In this film and in later representations in pop culture, this dinosaur appears as a robust bipedal theropod, comparable in size to Tyrannosaurus, only with an elongated skull reminiscent of a crocodile, a claw larger than the rest on each hand, and a semicircular sail on the back . This very specific image could have made us believe that we knew the anatomy of this dinosaur well. But it’s not like that. We are just now getting to rebuilding her look and lifestyle. Where did that reconstruction of yours come from in 2001? What do we know about him according to the most current paleontology?
To talk about Spinosaurus we must travel back in time, but not necessarily to the Cretaceous. We have to travel to the beginning of the 20th century. In 1910, the German paleontologist Karl Heinrich Ernst Stromer was conducting an expedition to the Bahariya oasis in Egypt , whose rocks dated to the Cretaceous period. Although they only expected to find mammals and were prepared to extract small or medium-sized bones, the bones of large dinosaurs awaited them. As a result of these expeditions, dinosaurs were described that in the long run have become very important and have even earned a place in popular culture. In 1915 Stromer published a new species of theropod dinosaur, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, which means “spiny lizard found in Egypt”, referring to its very high vertebral spines, responsible for the sail along its back , and to its geographical origin. It was also characterized by having conical teeth , similar to those of a crocodile, instead of being flattened and knife-shaped, as is usual in theropod dinosaurs. When they were finally able to transport all the fossil bones, they arrived in Munich, where they were exhibited at the Academy of Sciences.
During World War II, Stromer tried to move the fossil collection somewhere safe for fear of bombing. Perhaps because Stromer refused to join the National Socialist party at the time and openly maintained contact with his Jewish colleagues, he was ignored. And things ended badly for his fossils: in April 1944, the Munich railway station was bombed , also destroying nearby buildings, including the museum of the Academy of Sciences , where dinosaurs were kept. Fortunately, as Stromer had already published his work on these specimens, the information was not completely lost, although the fossils themselves were. The first reconstruction of Spinosaurus was very generic, an ordinary theropod dinosaur with a sail on its back, formed by the tall spines of its vertebrae. And for 70 years, the image of Spinosaurus was that.
In the 1980s, after the discovery of the British theropod Baryonyx, things changed, and Baryonyx could be related to Spinosaurus, giving rise to a new family, the spinosaurs . In 1997, the American paleontologist Paul Sereno and his team from the University of Chicago discovered in Gadoufaoua, Niger, bones of a new member of this family, Suchomimus, described in 1998. Being so closely related to Spinosaurus, these features were used to complete the appearance of that mysterious dinosaur. And that’s how we got to the Spinosaurus we all remember from Jurassic Park III. A very robust species of Baryonyx or Suchomimus with a sail on its back.
In 2014, just 100 years after Stromer’s original description, new specimens of Spinosaurus from Morocco were published. These revealed that this dinosaur was even stranger: it had short legs, an elongated back, and its long arms possibly reached the ground. Its sail seemed to have a more square or irregular morphology and, most interestingly, it was proposed that it could be adapted to amphibious life. The results of these investigations, this strange elongated and aquatic Spinosaurus , have been very controversial, but although it is still debated whether it was aquatic or not, its strange appearance remains. Spinosaurus needed 100 years of finds and research to reveal its true appearance.
In Jurassic Park III he is shown as a gigantic theropod dinosaur on a par with Tyrannosaurus, and actually kills one. Fortunately, within the canon of the saga they have introduced the idea that their dinosaurs never had pure DNA , and therefore their appearance was not what the true non-avian dinosaurs had, which became extinct 66 million years ago.
References:
Smith, J.B. et al. 2006. New information regarding the holotype of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus Stromer, 1915. Journal of Paleontology, 80: 400-406.
Charig, A.J.; Milner, A.C. 1997. Baryonyx walkeri, a fish-eating dinosaur from the Wealden of Surrey». Bulletin of the Natural History Museum, Geology Series 53 (1): 11-70.
Ibrahim, N. et al. 2014. Semiaquatic adaptations in a giant predatory dinosaur. Science, doi:10.1126/science.1258750
Sereno, P.C. et al. 1998. A long-snouted predatory dinosaur from Africa and the evolution of spinosaurids. Science, 282 (5392): 1298-1302
