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What Is a Spinosaurus?
And why is everybody talking about her right now?
The lovely spinosaurus is back in the news where she belongs after an article in the journal Nature revealed a naughty little secret that this clever girl has been keeping from us for about 100 million years: Spiny could swim.
Devious little gossiphounds that they are, the folks at Nature could barely contain their glee as they flaunted their new discovery in the faces of almost a century of stodgy, nay-saying paleontologist party poopers who have been trying to rob our precious spinosaurus of the respect she deserves since 1910:
In recent decades, intensive research on non-avian dinosaurs has strongly suggested that these animals were restricted to terrestrial environments. Historical proposals that some groups, such as sauropods and hadrosaurs, lived in aquatic environments were abandoned decades ago. It has recently been argued that at least some of the spinosaurids — an unusual group of large-bodied theropods of the Cretaceous era — were semi-aquatic, but this idea has been challenged on anatomical, biomechanical and taphonomic grounds, and remains controversial. Here we present unambiguous evidence for an aquatic propulsive structure in a dinosaur, the giant theropod Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.
Hear that, squares? The giant theropod that you’ve been discounting since the majestically named Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach pulled her fossils out of Egypt more than a century ago could swim circles around all of you.
Despite being bigger than a boring-ass T-Rex at 50 FEET LONG, with a literal crocodile mouth for a mouth, plus a whole lot of attitude*, the spinosaurus is consistently underrated. But now we know (thanks to the recent discovery of an almost complete tail in Morocco and an article published by researcher Nizar Ibrahim and his team in Nature) that she has a “tail with an unexpected and unique shape that consists of extremely tall neural spines and elongate chevrons, which forms a large, flexible fin-like organ capable of extensive lateral excursion,” so maybe the healing can finally begin.
I want to be the first to say what will doubtless become the consensus of the scientific community going forward: The spinosaurus is a marvelous, glorious, fearless, and, yes, semi-aquatic, badass, and she is our literal queen. I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that we should worship her as a benevolent swimming deity.
“This is certainly a bit of a surprise,” University of Maryland paleontologist Tom Holtz told National Geographic. “Spinosaurus is even weirder than we thought it was.”
Damn right. Now let’s never underestimate this beautiful fish** again.
*Author’s unscientific opinion.
**Not a fish.
