You're gonna need a bigger boat.

September 11, 2014 2:11 PM

A gigantic fish-eater (Bigger than a T. rex!) with a crocodile snout and a large sail on its back, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus has always been a strange and enigmatic creature. It may have just become something stranger: a semiaquatic, quadrupedal theropod dinosaur.

The New Spinosaurus:

The turn-of-the-century Spinosaurus popularized in Jurassic Park III and numerous pieces of paleoart stood tall over Cretaceous floodplains. But the hips and legs described by Ibrahim and coauthors look quite small and relatively weak. The femur – or upper leg bone – is short, yet has a robust flange of bone for a major leg-tail muscle retractor. And the foot bones of Spinosaurus are flat, with broad toe claws. This was not a dinosaur suited to running down prey. Spinosaurus, as envisioned in the new research, would have propelled itself through the water with strokes of its feet and sinuous flicks of its tail.

Whether the new Spinosaurus best represents the real animal remains to be seen. The fantastic images of Spinosaurus that have come out of today’s media blitz are based upon a hodgepodge reconstruction that draws from many different dinosaurs. There’s the new subadult skeleton, digital representations of the original and long-lost Spinosaurus bones, vertebrae and hands that may or may not belong to Spinosaurus, as well as replacement parts from an assortment of spinosaurs, all scaled to fit together. The dramatic departure of Spinosaurus from the previous release is a hypothesis that will be tweaked as additional specimens are discovered.

posted by brundlefly (39 comments total)

Neato! I love how dinosaur knowledge has advanced so much since my childhood, and even my son's childhood. Feathers! Aquatic spinosari! thanks for sharing..
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 2:21 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

I always think that they should show these human figures-for-comparison running away at top speed rather than thoughtfully considering this beast.
posted by goethean at 2:25 PM on September 11, 2014 [14 favorites]

goethean: I always imagine the human thoughtfully pondering that they're about to be devoured and that its too late to do anything about it. "Hmm, maybe I should have run sooner. Oh well!"
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:48 PM on September 11, 2014

goethean: "I always think that they should show these human figures-for-comparison running away at top speed rather than thoughtfully considering this beast."

I like how this "hellpig" was placed next to Alfred Hitchcock for scale.
posted by brundlefly at 2:54 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Spinosaurus fishes for prey. Interestingly even this documentary from 2011 now looks outdated.
posted by Carius at 3:13 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have an armchair theory that T-rex spent most of its time in the water.
posted by popcassady at 3:17 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have a theory that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:21 PM on September 11, 2014 [12 favorites]

"... a semiaquatic, quadrupedal theropod dinosaur."

A! Gent! Spi!!
posted by mhoye at 3:24 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

...armchair...T-rex

Wow, low blow.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:26 PM on September 11, 2014 [8 favorites]

I have a theory that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.

Ahem!
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:31 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

"Hmm, maybe I should have run sooner. Oh well!"

Or "I've wasted my life."
posted by resurrexit at 3:35 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Spinosaurus, as envisioned in the new research, would have propelled itself through the water with strokes of its feet and sinuous flicks of its tail.

So, um, let's take a vote. Who says that spiny sail actually served as a sail, as in sailboat? Long-distance migration?
posted by brambleboy at 3:44 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

My vote's for advertising. "EAT AT REX'S!"
posted by brundlefly at 3:57 PM on September 11, 2014

Love this, and yeah, wonder how many more dinosaurs had watery lifestyles.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:01 PM on September 11, 2014

Yeah, it's kind of funny to think that, quite a while ago, paleontologists rejected the idea of semiaquatic herbivorous dinosaurs (duckbills, sauropods). Now we finally may have an aquatic dinosaur and it's a gigantic predator.
posted by brundlefly at 4:24 PM on September 11, 2014

brundlefly: That is fascinating - what evidence led them reject the idea that sauropods were semi-aquatic?
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:36 PM on September 11, 2014

Joey Michaels: Sauropods had air sacs in their skeletons, which was known back in the late 1800's but not fully taken into account until the mid-20th century or so. A paper from 2004 broke down the biomechanics and concluded that floating sauropods would be kind of wobbly and prone to rolling over in the water, which would make an aquatic lifestyle difficult.
posted by bettafish at 5:11 PM on September 11, 2014 [5 favorites]

It was generally thought that sauropods were incapable of supporting their enormous bulk without the help of water. Now we know that they could support themselves on dry land, so there is no reason to assume a watery existence. Actually, they had a bird-like system of air sacs and hollow bones (a trait that probably helped them get so big) which would have made them way too floaty and unstable in water.

On preview: what bettafish said.
posted by brundlefly at 5:12 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

From the wiki page on Sauropoda:

Evidence for swimming in sauropods comes from fossil trackways that have occasionally been found to preserve only the forefeet (manus) impressions. Henderson showed that such trackways can be explained by sauropods with long forelimbs (such as macronarians) floating in relatively shallow water deep enough to keep the shorter hind legs free of the bottom, and using the front limbs to punt forward.[22] However, due to their body proportions, floating sauropods would also have been very unstable and maladapted for extended periods in the water. This mode of aquatic locomotion, combined with its instability, led Henderson to refer to sauropods in water as "tipsy punters".

posted by brundlefly at 5:16 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

With its flat feet, Spinosaurus may have paddled like a duck.

I've always known that we can't trust ducks. Nor geese. Nor swans. They are just waiting for the stars to turn again!
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:27 PM on September 11, 2014

I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down bread crumbs from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the pinfeathers that fall from world to world to sow death and madness. . . .

-- Howard Philips The Duck
posted by ursus_comiter at 5:39 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

What about duck-billed dinosaurs? Surely they're still semi-aquatic?
posted by sneebler at 5:49 PM on September 11, 2014

Nope!
posted by brundlefly at 6:04 PM on September 11, 2014

Another cool 'Planet Dinosaur' clip - Spinosaurus vs Carcharodontosaurus
posted by rosswald at 6:05 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Air sacs in the bones of sauropods! The More You Know...
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:12 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm fond of this scale human waving "Hey guys!" as a series of theropods approach in formation.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:09 PM on September 11, 2014

Eponysterical.
posted by brundlefly at 2:18 AM on September 12, 2014

So, um, let's take a vote. Who says that spiny sail actually served as a sail, as in sailboat? Long-distance migration?

Seriously - if this thing swam close to the surface like a crocodile, how did it avoid flipping over in heavy winds?
posted by Dr Dracator at 5:16 AM on September 12, 2014

A small derail, but I'd like to ask you smarty pants a question I've been wondering about for a long time. Ahem:

If future paleontologists, say 65 million years from now, found an elephant skeleton, would they be able to tell it had a trunk?
posted by Trochanter at 7:39 AM on September 12, 2014

I think bone structure would give them a clue that *something* was going on: can an elephant even get food into its mouth without using its trunk? Could a trunkless elephant move its head low enough to graze like a cow, and wouldn't the tusks get in the way?
posted by Dr Dracator at 8:56 AM on September 12, 2014

Spinosaurus probably ate sharks.

Which is great, because the two things stuff about dinosaurs say to emphasize how fierce some prehistoric predator was are "Bigger than a T-Rex" and "probably ate sharks," and this one gets both.
posted by Gygesringtone at 9:06 AM on September 12, 2014

Not an expert, possibly a smarty pants, but my understanding is that the muscle attachment scars on the skulls of trunked animals are a big clue. Of course it would probably help if future paleontologists had contemporary trunked animals to extrapolate from.
posted by bettafish at 9:40 AM on September 12, 2014

I would be very grateful if one of you could draw some pictures of various dinosaurs with elephant-like trunks, particularly t-rex.
posted by Joey Michaels at 10:03 AM on September 12, 2014

Trochanter: "If future paleontologists, say 65 million years from now, found an elephant skeleton, would they be able to tell it had a trunk?"

A while back there was speculation that sauropods had trunks. It never went anywhere, though. Neat idea.

I really have no idea, but Darren Naish (writer of the "has always been" link) co-wrote a neat book called All Yesterdays. It's basically speculative paleoart. What characteristics and behaviors are we missing when we just look at skeletons? Tree-climbing Protoceratops? Fat duckbills? It ends with a section devoted to how paleontologists of the future would interpret the remains of modern animals.

Cats are absolutely terrifying if you shrinkrap their skeletons the way we do dinosaurs.
posted by brundlefly at 10:08 AM on September 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

If future paleontologists, say 65 million years from now, found an elephant skeleton, would they be able to tell it had a trunk?

Past paleontologists assumed it was a giant with a single eye. Then the Persians invaded, and they were like, "Ohhh, so that's what those are. Weird."
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:41 AM on September 12, 2014

Speaking of speculative reconstructions and All Yesterdays </awkward segue>, there were these "weird shrimp*" called anomalocaridids who were the fearsome apex predators of the ocean more than 400 million years ago. Recently it was discovered that, just as some species of sharks and whales adapted from predating on large animals to suspension feeding on plankton, so did some anomalocaridids. And the really cool part is that this discovery was anticipated some months beforehand by a paleoartist who contributed this drawing of a creature he called Ceticaris to All Your Yesterdays, All Yesterday's crowdsourced follow-up. In his honor the new group is called the cetiocarids.

So yeah, there's some weird stuff and retrospectively hilarious misunderstandings, but science, man.


*Not actual shrimp.
posted by bettafish at 11:20 AM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Armchair T-Rex....the new name of my band.
posted by mule98J at 11:33 AM on September 12, 2014

"There's something fishy about the new Spinosaurus", a commentary from paleoartist/paleontologist Scott Hartman, who specializes in skeletal reconstructions.
posted by bettafish at 11:39 AM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

> If future paleontologists, say 65 million years from now, found an elephant skeleton, would they be able to tell it had a trunk?

Reddit says yes.
posted by fragmede at 9:39 PM on September 12, 2014