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.
