The Gang of Five
Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => The Fridge => Topic started by: Nahla on September 12, 2014, 06:06:39 AM
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I was browsing on Facebook and noticed something in 'Trending' that caught my eye.
Spinosaurus-half duck half crocodile dinosaur?
(http://i61.tinypic.com/168yfjr.jpg)
The largest predatory dinosaur to walk this earth wasn’t the T. rex. It was Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a 50-foot long creature with powerful jaws and a solid, spiny sail on its back that dwelled in Northern Africa 95 million years ago. But even though paleontologists have known about this particular dinosaur for almost a century, its true form has only just been revealed.
"THE ONLY DINOSAUR THAT SHOWS [AQUATIC] ADAPTATIONS."
This is "the first water-adapted non-avian dinosaur on record," said University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno in a press conference yesterday. Sereno is part of a team of researchers that was finally able to reconstruct Spinosaurus in full using newly discovered fossils and information gathered from the dinosaur’s initial discoverer, a German paleontologist named Ernst Stromer. According to their reconstruction, published today in Science, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was a gigantic fish-eating, water-paddling marvel; one that, in Sereno’s words, was "a chimera รณ half duck, half crocodile."
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Article (http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/11/6136443/the-largest-predatory-dinosaur-ever-was-half-duck-half-crocodile)
Just thought you guys might be interested,it's new news to me. I did not know this.
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Great story! It has been known that spinosaurids were fish-hunters, but it hasn't been known that Spinosaurus was this well-adapted to water.
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Spinosaurus just keep getting cooler the more we learn about them :D .
I kind of think of them as more of a mix between Crocodiles and Grizzly Bears, though.
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Interesting. I didn't know much about the Spinosaurus before.
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Fascinating. It is amazing the amount of discoveries that have been made in just the last few years concerning dinosaurs. This new finding also makes some popular depictions of Spinosaurus (as in Jurassic Park III, for example) look silly. Well, sillier than they already were.