Friday, September 12, 2014

Mmmm, I think I'll eat a shark for dinner tonight.

Spinosaurus, the Biggest Meat-Eating Dino Ever Discovered, Ate Entire Sharks
The sail-backed predator Spinosaurus is not only the biggest meat-eating dinosaur known, larger than T. rex. According to new research, it may also be the earliest known dinosaur to swim. A new study in Science says that Spinosaurus probably hunted in rivers with its sail rising from the water like the dorsal fin of the great white shark.

"Every time I see the sail on Spinosaurus, I'm going to hear the Jaws theme in my head," says lead study author Nizar Ibrahim, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

The first fossils of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus were discovered more than a century ago by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in the Egyptian Sahara. But all of Stromer's fossils were destroyed in World War II during the 1944 Allied bombing of Munich, leaving much uncertain about this carnivore. In 2008, however, 97-million-year-old fossils appeared across the Sahara, in Morocco. Those fossils are now, at long last, revealing Spinosaurus.

The fossils suggest an adult Spinosaurus would be more than 49 feet long head to tail, more than 9 feet longer than the largest known Tyrannosaurus rex. "It was the largest predatory dinosaur to roam the Earth that we know of," Ibrahim says.

Read more here

No comments:

Post a Comment