WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.100 You know, when we talk about dinosaurs, we usually 00:00:02.100 --> 00:00:04.500 talk about them like they are statues. Points 00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:06.700 in history, yeah. Right. You picture a T -Rex, 00:00:06.860 --> 00:00:09.740 and it's always a T -Rex. Big head, tiny arms, 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:13.660 angry eyebrows. The science on the silhouette 00:00:13.660 --> 00:00:17.039 is pretty much settled. But then I start looking 00:00:17.039 --> 00:00:19.000 into the sources you sent over for this deep 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.699 dive, and I realize there is one massive exception 00:00:21.699 --> 00:00:24.530 to that rule. Oh, yeah. The shapeshifter. Just 00:00:24.530 --> 00:00:26.890 binosaurus. It really is the problem child of 00:00:26.890 --> 00:00:29.589 paleontology. It just refuses to sit still. It's 00:00:29.589 --> 00:00:33.630 wild. If you look at a textbook from, say, the 00:00:33.630 --> 00:00:36.630 1980s, then you watch Jurassic Park 3rd from 00:00:36.630 --> 00:00:40.829 2001, and then you read a paper from 2020, you 00:00:40.829 --> 00:00:42.909 are looking at three completely different animals. 00:00:43.049 --> 00:00:45.630 Complete. It goes from this generic... T -Rex 00:00:45.630 --> 00:00:49.850 with a sail to a short -legged, almost dachshund 00:00:49.850 --> 00:00:52.630 -like creature, and then to a full -blown river 00:00:52.630 --> 00:00:55.090 monster with a paddle tail. And that's what makes 00:00:55.090 --> 00:00:57.030 this specific deep dive so interesting. We aren't 00:00:57.030 --> 00:00:58.630 just talking about a set of bones here. We're 00:00:58.630 --> 00:01:02.030 tracking a 100 -year -old detective story. A 00:01:02.030 --> 00:01:04.430 detective story that involves World War II bombings. 00:01:04.430 --> 00:01:06.170 That part of the source material just floored 00:01:06.170 --> 00:01:08.989 me. It involves the Royal Air Force, eccentric 00:01:08.989 --> 00:01:12.129 German aristocrats, secret deals in the Moroccan 00:01:12.129 --> 00:01:15.680 desert, and... what can only be described as 00:01:15.680 --> 00:01:19.859 a modern day academic civil war. Civil war feels 00:01:19.859 --> 00:01:22.180 appropriate given the tone of some of these papers 00:01:22.180 --> 00:01:24.500 I was reading. They are not pulling punches. 00:01:24.780 --> 00:01:27.560 Oh, it gets heated. You have paleontologists 00:01:27.560 --> 00:01:29.900 publicly calling each other's work a chimera, 00:01:29.939 --> 00:01:32.780 which is, you know, fighting words in this field. 00:01:33.150 --> 00:01:35.329 Okay, so here's the mission for today then. We 00:01:35.329 --> 00:01:37.629 need to figure out how the largest carnivorous 00:01:37.629 --> 00:01:40.549 dinosaur ever discovered, and yes, the sources 00:01:40.549 --> 00:01:43.010 are clear, it was bigger than T -Rex, bigger 00:01:43.010 --> 00:01:46.109 than Giganotosaurus. Longer anyway. The wait 00:01:46.109 --> 00:01:48.329 is a whole other debate. Right, longer. How did 00:01:48.329 --> 00:01:50.709 this thing go from a pile of destroyed fragments 00:01:50.709 --> 00:01:53.269 to the aquatic predator we think we know today? 00:01:53.590 --> 00:01:56.170 And as we do that, we have to unpack Stromer's 00:01:56.170 --> 00:01:58.590 riddle. Which is, I saw that phrase pop up a 00:01:58.590 --> 00:02:01.250 lot. It's his ecological impossibility. The fossil 00:02:01.250 --> 00:02:04.269 beds where we find Spinosaurus are just choked 00:02:04.269 --> 00:02:06.769 with giant predators. So the riddle is, how do 00:02:06.769 --> 00:02:08.449 you have an ecosystem that supports three or 00:02:08.449 --> 00:02:10.490 four different giant carnivores at the same time? 00:02:10.830 --> 00:02:13.050 The math just doesn't work. It's like having 00:02:13.050 --> 00:02:16.210 lions, tigers, and grizzly bears all hunting 00:02:16.210 --> 00:02:19.069 in the same square mile. Exactly. It shouldn't 00:02:19.069 --> 00:02:21.189 be possible. Or at least it shouldn't be. Okay, 00:02:21.270 --> 00:02:22.669 I definitely want to get to the math on that. 00:02:22.810 --> 00:02:26.830 But first, we have to go back. Way back. Before 00:02:26.830 --> 00:02:29.650 the movies, before the computer models, we need 00:02:29.650 --> 00:02:32.270 to go to 1912. To the golden age of digging, 00:02:32.490 --> 00:02:34.889 yeah. The protagonist of this part of the story 00:02:34.889 --> 00:02:38.169 is... Ernst Stromer. Ernst Freier Stromer von 00:02:38.169 --> 00:02:40.129 Reichenbach, to be precise. A bit of a mouthful. 00:02:40.169 --> 00:02:42.650 He was a German aristocrat, a paleontologist, 00:02:42.669 --> 00:02:45.909 and honestly, a man obsessed. He wasn't looking 00:02:45.909 --> 00:02:48.370 in the usual places at the time. Everyone was 00:02:48.370 --> 00:02:50.629 digging in North America, you know, the bone 00:02:50.629 --> 00:02:54.229 wars, looking for... T -Rex and Triceratops. 00:02:54.650 --> 00:02:57.210 Stromer went to Egypt. Specifically the Baharia 00:02:57.210 --> 00:02:59.610 Formation in the Western Desert. And just to 00:02:59.610 --> 00:03:01.169 set the scene for you listening, this isn't a 00:03:01.169 --> 00:03:03.210 comfortable dig. We're not talking about a university 00:03:03.210 --> 00:03:05.969 team with modern equipment. No, absolutely not. 00:03:06.090 --> 00:03:09.610 This is 1912. There's no GPS, no satellite phones, 00:03:09.789 --> 00:03:12.770 no air -conditioned SUVs. It's you, a local team, 00:03:12.969 --> 00:03:16.349 a string of camels, and the heat. And the Baharia 00:03:16.349 --> 00:03:19.430 Formation isn't just sand. It's this complex... 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:22.800 baked system of ancient mangrove swamps that 00:03:22.800 --> 00:03:25.740 have turned to rock. It's brutal work. And it's 00:03:25.740 --> 00:03:28.139 there that he finds it, or rather his collector, 00:03:28.300 --> 00:03:30.719 Richard Markgraf, finds it for him. Right. Markgraf 00:03:30.719 --> 00:03:33.120 was an Austrian fossil collector who had this 00:03:33.120 --> 00:03:35.319 incredible knack for finding things no one else 00:03:35.319 --> 00:03:38.199 could. He was Stromer's man on the ground. And 00:03:38.199 --> 00:03:40.939 in 1912, they unearthed the specimen that they 00:03:40.939 --> 00:03:45.280 cataloged as BSP 1912 -819. Catch your name. 00:03:45.400 --> 00:03:47.750 We'll call it the holotype. Please. It's the 00:03:47.750 --> 00:03:49.550 single most important specimen, the one that 00:03:49.550 --> 00:03:51.830 defines the species. Now, when I read the inventory 00:03:51.830 --> 00:03:53.610 of what they found, it didn't seem like much 00:03:53.610 --> 00:03:55.949 at first glance. A lower jaw, some teeth, and 00:03:55.949 --> 00:03:57.990 some vertebrae. But then I looked at the measurements 00:03:57.990 --> 00:04:00.930 from Stromer's notes. The scale is just... Yeah. 00:04:01.050 --> 00:04:02.650 It's hard to wrap your head around, even now. 00:04:02.810 --> 00:04:05.090 The spine sticking out of the backbone? The dorsal 00:04:05.090 --> 00:04:07.710 neural spines, yes. They were up to 1 .65 meters 00:04:07.710 --> 00:04:10.129 long. Which is about five and a half feet. That's 00:04:10.129 --> 00:04:12.289 a person. That's a whole human being in height 00:04:12.289 --> 00:04:14.210 just sticking straight up out of the animal's 00:04:14.210 --> 00:04:16.689 back. Exactly. And Stromer knew immediately he 00:04:16.689 --> 00:04:20.050 had something weird. In 1915, he publishes the 00:04:20.050 --> 00:04:23.870 description and names it Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, 00:04:23.949 --> 00:04:27.430 the spine lizard of Egypt. But here's the key 00:04:27.430 --> 00:04:29.610 insight from Stromer's original notes, which 00:04:29.610 --> 00:04:32.829 is just brilliant for the time. He focused on 00:04:32.829 --> 00:04:35.370 the jaw. Because it wasn't a T -Rex jaw. Not 00:04:35.370 --> 00:04:39.600 even close. Tyrannosaurus has a broad... U -shaped 00:04:39.600 --> 00:04:42.680 crushing snout. Yeah. It's a bone breaker. Stromer 00:04:42.680 --> 00:04:45.439 saw that Spinosaurus had this long, narrow snout, 00:04:45.439 --> 00:04:47.839 almost like a crocodile. And the teeth were different 00:04:47.839 --> 00:04:49.860 too, right? Totally different. They weren't serrated, 00:04:49.899 --> 00:04:51.839 steak -nized like a T -Rex's. They were cones. 00:04:52.019 --> 00:04:55.319 Cones, like crocodile teeth. Very similar. Unserrated, 00:04:55.420 --> 00:04:57.579 perfectly conical. They were for gripping, not 00:04:57.579 --> 00:05:00.100 slicing. They were designed to puncture and hold 00:05:00.100 --> 00:05:02.060 onto something slippery. A fish. That was his 00:05:02.060 --> 00:05:04.920 hypothesis. So even in 1915, Stromer is scratching 00:05:04.920 --> 00:05:07.240 his head thinking, this is a giant predator, 00:05:07.379 --> 00:05:09.339 but it's built... different. It's not playing 00:05:09.339 --> 00:05:11.560 the same game as the others. But here's the problem, 00:05:11.639 --> 00:05:13.459 and this is where the shapeshifting really starts. 00:05:13.680 --> 00:05:16.600 He didn't find the legs, did he? No legs, no 00:05:16.600 --> 00:05:20.079 pelvis, no arms, no tail, really. Just the spine, 00:05:20.240 --> 00:05:22.300 parts of the jaw, and a few other scraps. It 00:05:22.300 --> 00:05:25.189 was a tantalizingly incomplete picture. So what 00:05:25.189 --> 00:05:27.310 did he do? He had this amazing discovery, but 00:05:27.310 --> 00:05:29.350 couldn't really show people what it looked like. 00:05:29.529 --> 00:05:31.949 Well, he did what scientists often did back then 00:05:31.949 --> 00:05:35.709 and still do, really. He extrapolated. In 1936, 00:05:35.850 --> 00:05:38.069 he wanted to build a mount for the museum in 00:05:38.069 --> 00:05:41.050 Munich, the Paleontologist's Museum. He has this 00:05:41.050 --> 00:05:44.610 massive spine, this long jaw, but he needs it 00:05:44.610 --> 00:05:47.350 to stand up. So he needed to fill in the blanks. 00:05:47.350 --> 00:05:49.970 He had to. So he looked at what he knew. The 00:05:49.970 --> 00:05:52.089 big two -legged predators from North America 00:05:52.089 --> 00:05:54.649 like Tyrannosaurus and Gorgosaurus. He copy -pasted. 00:05:54.810 --> 00:05:57.490 Essentially, he grafted the robust long hind 00:05:57.490 --> 00:06:00.470 legs of a classic terrestrial predator onto this 00:06:00.470 --> 00:06:03.490 weird fish -eating sail -backed creature. Yeah. 00:06:03.589 --> 00:06:05.610 He made it a standard issue monster. And that 00:06:05.610 --> 00:06:07.910 created the image that stuck for 50 years, the 00:06:07.910 --> 00:06:10.610 Godzilla with a fin look. It became the canonical 00:06:10.610 --> 00:06:14.009 image. That mount was the only Spinosaurus the 00:06:14.009 --> 00:06:18.480 world had. But that mount. That physical representation 00:06:18.480 --> 00:06:21.879 of the animal. It had a target on its back. We 00:06:21.879 --> 00:06:24.199 have to talk about Munich. We do. This is the 00:06:24.199 --> 00:06:26.439 absolute tragedy of the story. It's a gut punch. 00:06:26.639 --> 00:06:30.199 It's 1944. World War II is at its peak. And the 00:06:30.199 --> 00:06:32.459 Spinosaurus is sitting in the museum in Munich. 00:06:33.019 --> 00:06:35.899 Now, usually, museums move their best stuff to 00:06:35.899 --> 00:06:38.379 salt mines or caves during wartime, right? To 00:06:38.379 --> 00:06:40.060 protect them from air raids. That was standard 00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:42.819 protocol. The Louvre did it. The British Museum 00:06:42.819 --> 00:06:45.720 did it. And Stromer begged for it. He pleaded 00:06:45.720 --> 00:06:47.920 with the museum director to move the Spinosaurus 00:06:47.920 --> 00:06:50.180 and all the other priceless Baharia fossils to 00:06:50.180 --> 00:06:53.439 safety. But the director said no. Why? Why would 00:06:53.439 --> 00:06:55.819 you risk a one -of -a -kind fossil? Politics. 00:06:56.399 --> 00:07:00.160 Petty, dangerous politics. Stromer was an aristocrat, 00:07:00.160 --> 00:07:03.079 an old -school German intellectual, but he was 00:07:03.079 --> 00:07:06.079 not a fan of the Nazi regime. He was openly critical, 00:07:06.240 --> 00:07:08.540 and his sons had run -ins with the party. And 00:07:08.540 --> 00:07:10.360 the museum director? The director, on the other 00:07:10.360 --> 00:07:13.089 hand, was a fervent party member. There's a deep 00:07:13.089 --> 00:07:15.129 personal and political feud between them. So 00:07:15.129 --> 00:07:17.410 because Stromer wouldn't tow the party line, 00:07:17.730 --> 00:07:20.509 the director decided to gamble with the fossils. 00:07:20.970 --> 00:07:23.649 He refused to authorize a transport. He basically 00:07:23.649 --> 00:07:25.750 said they were safe where they were and that 00:07:25.750 --> 00:07:28.050 moving them was too much trouble. He left them 00:07:28.050 --> 00:07:30.230 right in the city center. And then came the night 00:07:30.230 --> 00:07:34.009 of April 24th, 1944. The British Royal Air Force 00:07:34.009 --> 00:07:37.129 launched a massive bombing raid on Munich. It 00:07:37.129 --> 00:07:39.250 was part of the strategic bombing campaign to 00:07:39.250 --> 00:07:41.389 cripple German infrastructure. I tried to find 00:07:41.389 --> 00:07:43.490 photos of the aftermath and the notes he sent. 00:07:43.589 --> 00:07:45.810 It's just rubble. The whole area was flattened. 00:07:45.850 --> 00:07:48.610 Total destruction. The museum took a direct hit. 00:07:48.730 --> 00:07:51.550 The entire building was gutted by fire and explosives. 00:07:52.129 --> 00:07:55.709 The holotype, the only known skeleton of Spinosaurus 00:07:55.709 --> 00:07:58.509 in the entire world, was incinerated. That's 00:07:58.509 --> 00:08:00.629 hard to process. Imagine if we lost the Mona 00:08:00.629 --> 00:08:02.990 Lisa and the only proof we had that it ever existed 00:08:02.990 --> 00:08:05.230 were a few sketches and a black and white photo. 00:08:05.740 --> 00:08:08.139 That is exactly the situation paleontology was 00:08:08.139 --> 00:08:11.399 left in. For the next 50 years, Spinosaurus ceased 00:08:11.399 --> 00:08:14.300 to exist as a physical object. It became a ghost. 00:08:14.500 --> 00:08:17.480 It lived entirely in Stromer's detailed monographs 00:08:17.480 --> 00:08:20.220 and a few photographs that, ironically, were 00:08:20.220 --> 00:08:22.439 rediscovered in family archives much, much later 00:08:22.439 --> 00:08:25.420 in the 90s. So for half a century, anyone drawing 00:08:25.420 --> 00:08:28.500 a dinosaur book or making a toy just had to guess 00:08:28.500 --> 00:08:31.220 based on Stromer's old Frankenstein reconstruction? 00:08:31.920 --> 00:08:34.820 Yes. That was the only data we had. And that's 00:08:34.820 --> 00:08:37.259 why if you grew up in the 80s or 90s, your toy 00:08:37.259 --> 00:08:39.519 Spinosaurus looked like a generic meat eater 00:08:39.519 --> 00:08:41.620 with a sail. Yeah. We literally didn't know any 00:08:41.620 --> 00:08:43.200 better because the evidence had turned to ash. 00:08:43.379 --> 00:08:45.539 But a ghost doesn't stay dead forever, not in 00:08:45.539 --> 00:08:48.179 paleontology anyway. No. Nature has a way of 00:08:48.179 --> 00:08:50.559 resurfacing. The story wasn't over. This brings 00:08:50.559 --> 00:08:53.759 us to the resurrection, the second act. But interestingly, 00:08:54.019 --> 00:08:56.940 the first clue didn't come from Egypt. It came 00:08:56.940 --> 00:08:59.860 from a clay pit in Surrey, England. Of all places, 00:08:59.899 --> 00:09:02.419 yeah. the rainy English countryside. Tell me 00:09:02.419 --> 00:09:04.600 about the Baryonyx. This seems like a key piece 00:09:04.600 --> 00:09:08.039 of the puzzle. So it's 1986. An amateur fossil 00:09:08.039 --> 00:09:11.120 hunter finds this giant claw that leads to a 00:09:11.120 --> 00:09:14.279 dig, and they unearth a new dinosaur called Baryonyx. 00:09:14.419 --> 00:09:16.480 It's much smaller than Spinosaurus, maybe 30 00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:19.419 feet long, but it's weird. It has that same long 00:09:19.419 --> 00:09:22.679 crocodile -like snout. It has a massive hooked 00:09:22.679 --> 00:09:25.399 claw on its hand. And the really important part. 00:09:25.580 --> 00:09:27.779 And crucially... Inside the stomach region of 00:09:27.779 --> 00:09:31.019 the fossil, they found acid -etched fish scales. 00:09:31.320 --> 00:09:34.379 The smoking gun. It ate fish. It was a piscivore. 00:09:35.480 --> 00:09:38.019 Unequivocally. So baleontologists looked at baryonyx, 00:09:38.059 --> 00:09:40.519 then they dusted off Stromer's old drawings from 00:09:40.519 --> 00:09:43.059 1915, and the light bulb went on. They realized, 00:09:43.200 --> 00:09:45.039 wait a minute, these animals are cousins. So 00:09:45.039 --> 00:09:46.879 Spinosaurus wasn't a T -Rex relative. It was 00:09:46.879 --> 00:09:49.240 part of this whole other family of river -haunting 00:09:49.240 --> 00:09:52.559 weirdos. Spinosauridae family. This changed the 00:09:52.559 --> 00:09:54.799 game. It reframed the entire question. It meant 00:09:54.799 --> 00:09:56.480 we weren't looking for a... land predator that 00:09:56.480 --> 00:09:58.440 happened to have a sail. We were looking for 00:09:58.440 --> 00:10:01.039 a specialized water -loving animal. But we still 00:10:01.039 --> 00:10:03.700 didn't have the bones. We just had the cousin. 00:10:03.820 --> 00:10:05.820 It's like trying to describe a tiger when all 00:10:05.820 --> 00:10:08.179 you've ever seen is a house cat. Exactly. We 00:10:08.179 --> 00:10:10.659 needed a new Spinosaurus. And that meant going 00:10:10.659 --> 00:10:13.100 back to the desert. But not Egypt this time. 00:10:13.179 --> 00:10:15.720 The political situation was difficult. This time, 00:10:15.720 --> 00:10:18.399 the action shifts to the kembeds in Morocco. 00:10:18.909 --> 00:10:21.269 Right. And you see a lot of confusion in the 00:10:21.269 --> 00:10:23.970 sources from this period. New names start popping 00:10:23.970 --> 00:10:26.889 up like Spinosaurus, Moroccanus, Sigilmassosaurus. 00:10:27.149 --> 00:10:29.370 What was going on there? It's the lumper versus 00:10:29.370 --> 00:10:31.970 splitter debate. It's a classic paleontological 00:10:31.970 --> 00:10:34.169 argument. When you find a slightly different 00:10:34.169 --> 00:10:36.710 bone, is it a whole new species? Are you a splitter? 00:10:36.929 --> 00:10:39.289 Or is it just individual variation within the 00:10:39.289 --> 00:10:41.970 same species? Are you a lumper? The Moroccan 00:10:41.970 --> 00:10:44.350 fossils were fragmentary. So for a while it was 00:10:44.350 --> 00:10:47.870 chaos. Okay. So into this chaos steps Nizar Ibrahim. 00:10:48.320 --> 00:10:49.919 And this is where the story turns into a bit 00:10:49.919 --> 00:10:52.740 of an Indiana Jones script. Nizar is a fantastic 00:10:52.740 --> 00:10:55.740 paleontologist and a great storyteller. In the 00:10:55.740 --> 00:10:58.039 mid -2000s, he was doing fieldwork in Morocco. 00:10:58.639 --> 00:11:02.379 The chem beds are difficult. It's a red sandstone 00:11:02.379 --> 00:11:05.279 formation, very steep slopes. And unlike the 00:11:05.279 --> 00:11:07.779 sterile scientific digs of North America, there's 00:11:07.779 --> 00:11:10.159 a huge commercial fossil trade there. So you 00:11:10.159 --> 00:11:12.759 have locals digging for fossils to sell to tourists 00:11:12.759 --> 00:11:15.279 and collectors. Exactly. It's a source of income. 00:11:15.600 --> 00:11:18.000 So the science is often racing against the market. 00:11:18.500 --> 00:11:21.580 Nizar was in a town called Erfud, a hub for this 00:11:21.580 --> 00:11:24.200 trade, and a local fossil dealer showed him a 00:11:24.200 --> 00:11:26.440 cardboard box with some fragments. Just bits 00:11:26.440 --> 00:11:29.220 and pieces. A spine covered in a very particular 00:11:29.220 --> 00:11:32.559 sediment, a piece of a jaw. Nizar thought they 00:11:32.559 --> 00:11:35.019 looked interesting, maybe spinosaurid, but he 00:11:35.019 --> 00:11:36.779 didn't have the context. He took some notes and 00:11:36.779 --> 00:11:39.840 moved on. Fast forward a year, or a bit more. 00:11:39.980 --> 00:11:44.039 He's in a museum in Milan, Italy, and the curators 00:11:44.039 --> 00:11:46.399 there show him some new acquisitions they got 00:11:46.399 --> 00:11:49.159 from a dealer. Partial skeleton. He looks at 00:11:49.159 --> 00:11:51.440 them and he gets this intense sense of deja vu. 00:11:51.639 --> 00:11:53.919 He recognizes the bones. Not just the bones. 00:11:54.120 --> 00:11:56.600 The rock they're in. The sediment on the bones. 00:11:56.860 --> 00:11:59.659 The color of the sandstone. It perfectly matched 00:11:59.659 --> 00:12:02.139 the fragments he saw in that cardboard box in 00:12:02.139 --> 00:12:04.200 the desert a year earlier. He realized they were 00:12:04.200 --> 00:12:06.940 from the same animal. The dealer had sold different 00:12:06.940 --> 00:12:09.879 parts of one skeleton to different buyers. He 00:12:09.879 --> 00:12:12.710 suspected it. But to prove it? And more importantly, 00:12:12.889 --> 00:12:15.610 to find the rest of the skeleton, he had to find 00:12:15.610 --> 00:12:18.149 that one specific dealer in the middle of the 00:12:18.149 --> 00:12:21.190 Moroccan desert, a man he'd met only once, briefly. 00:12:21.429 --> 00:12:23.769 That seems impossible. I'm looking for a guy 00:12:23.769 --> 00:12:25.950 with a mustache who showed me a rock a year ago. 00:12:26.169 --> 00:12:28.610 It was a total needle in a haystack. But he went 00:12:28.610 --> 00:12:30.649 back. He and his team sat in tea shops and their 00:12:30.649 --> 00:12:32.750 food. They showed pictures. They asked around. 00:12:33.330 --> 00:12:36.870 And miraculously, against all odds, he found 00:12:36.870 --> 00:12:39.950 the man. Wow. And the man remembered where he 00:12:39.950 --> 00:12:42.600 found the bones. He did. He took Nisar to the 00:12:42.600 --> 00:12:45.419 exact hillside they started digging, and there 00:12:45.419 --> 00:12:48.200 they found it. More bones from the same individual. 00:12:48.940 --> 00:12:54.240 Specimen FSAKKK111888. The neotype. The successor 00:12:54.240 --> 00:12:56.559 to the lost throne of the holotype. The first 00:12:56.559 --> 00:12:59.139 reasonably complete skeleton since the bombing 00:12:59.139 --> 00:13:02.600 of Munich. And this time, it had legs. And this 00:13:02.600 --> 00:13:04.460 is where the bomb drops, because when they put 00:13:04.460 --> 00:13:06.610 those legs on the skeleton... It didn't look 00:13:06.610 --> 00:13:08.470 like the movie monster. It didn't even look like 00:13:08.470 --> 00:13:10.929 Stromer's monster. It looked wrong. To everyone 00:13:10.929 --> 00:13:13.629 who saw it, it looked broken. The legs were tiny. 00:13:13.830 --> 00:13:16.269 How tiny are we talking? Disproportionately short. 00:13:16.769 --> 00:13:19.549 If you look at a T -Rex, the legs are long, powerful 00:13:19.549 --> 00:13:21.870 pillars designed to hold up tons of weight. This 00:13:21.870 --> 00:13:23.789 thing had short, almost dub -behind legs like 00:13:23.789 --> 00:13:26.570 a bulldog's. And the pelvis was small. The center 00:13:26.570 --> 00:13:28.990 of gravity was way forward over the chest. So 00:13:28.990 --> 00:13:31.009 if it tried to walk on two legs, like in Jurassic 00:13:31.009 --> 00:13:33.470 Park... It would faceplant. The physics just 00:13:33.470 --> 00:13:35.769 don't work. It simply couldn't balance bipedally 00:13:35.769 --> 00:13:38.730 on land for any length of time. So Ibrahim and 00:13:38.730 --> 00:13:42.549 his team published this huge paper in 2014, and 00:13:42.549 --> 00:13:44.970 they make a radical claim. They say, this isn't 00:13:44.970 --> 00:13:47.649 a land predator. It's a quadruped. It walks on 00:13:47.649 --> 00:13:49.950 four legs. And they went further. They said it 00:13:49.950 --> 00:13:52.750 was semi -aquatic, not just eating fish from 00:13:52.750 --> 00:13:55.679 the bank, but actually living in the water. This 00:13:55.679 --> 00:13:58.460 was a paradigm shift. I remember when this news 00:13:58.460 --> 00:14:01.200 hit, the internet went crazy. People were, let's 00:14:01.200 --> 00:14:04.419 say, not happy with the Dachshundino. It upset 00:14:04.419 --> 00:14:07.019 the apple cart. You have to understand, we love 00:14:07.019 --> 00:14:09.580 our monsters. We want Spinosaurus to be this 00:14:09.580 --> 00:14:12.850 terrifying kaiju. And suddenly, science is telling 00:14:12.850 --> 00:14:15.409 us it's a giant, wet, short -legged salamander 00:14:15.409 --> 00:14:17.370 thing. And the scientific pushback was immediate, 00:14:17.549 --> 00:14:19.470 right? It wasn't just fanboys on the internet. 00:14:19.690 --> 00:14:22.009 Oh no, serious heavy hitters weighed in. Scott 00:14:22.009 --> 00:14:24.009 Hartman, John Hutchinson, these are experts in 00:14:24.009 --> 00:14:26.009 biomechanics. They looked at the measurements 00:14:26.009 --> 00:14:28.529 from the paper and said, hold on. Are you sure 00:14:28.529 --> 00:14:30.889 these bones belong to the same animal? The chimera 00:14:30.889 --> 00:14:34.149 theory. Exactly. This is a crucial concept. In 00:14:34.149 --> 00:14:37.090 paleontology, a chimera is when you accidentally 00:14:37.090 --> 00:14:39.950 mix bones from two different animals, or even 00:14:39.950 --> 00:14:41.649 two different individuals of different sizes, 00:14:41.789 --> 00:14:44.340 and build a creature that never existed. Because 00:14:44.340 --> 00:14:47.679 the chem beds are basically a prehistoric river 00:14:47.679 --> 00:14:50.779 delta, right? Rivers wash things together. Precisely. 00:14:50.779 --> 00:14:53.019 It's a jumble. You find a pile of bones. You 00:14:53.019 --> 00:14:55.240 assume it's one individual. But what if the spine 00:14:55.240 --> 00:14:58.259 is from a giant adult Spinosaurus and the legs 00:14:58.259 --> 00:15:00.419 are from a much smaller juvenile? Or what if 00:15:00.419 --> 00:15:03.220 they're from a different related species entirely, 00:15:03.559 --> 00:15:06.179 like Sigil massasaurus? If you put baby legs 00:15:06.179 --> 00:15:09.100 on a giant adult, you get a short -legged weirdo. 00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:12.120 Correct. So the skeptics said, this animal doesn't 00:15:12.120 --> 00:15:13.960 make biomechanical sense. It's probably a mistake. 00:15:14.159 --> 00:15:16.320 You've mixed up the bones. So we have a war. 00:15:16.460 --> 00:15:19.320 Team aquatic, quadruped versus team chimera. 00:15:19.419 --> 00:15:22.159 And for a few years, it was a stalemate. A real 00:15:22.159 --> 00:15:26.200 scientific deadlock. It was. Until 2020. Because 00:15:26.200 --> 00:15:28.860 Nizar Ibrahim went back to that same hill in 00:15:28.860 --> 00:15:31.240 Morocco, and he found the one bone that changes 00:15:31.240 --> 00:15:33.899 everything. The tail. The tail. It was unlike 00:15:33.899 --> 00:15:36.659 any dinosaur tail anyone had ever seen. But before 00:15:36.659 --> 00:15:38.860 we get to the tail, we need to take a quick step 00:15:38.860 --> 00:15:41.360 sideways into the chemistry. Because even before 00:15:41.360 --> 00:15:43.259 they found the tail, there was something in the 00:15:43.259 --> 00:15:45.600 teeth that suggested this animal wasn't walking 00:15:45.600 --> 00:15:48.799 on land. Right, the oxygen isotopes. This was 00:15:48.799 --> 00:15:51.200 Romain Amiotte's work back in 2010, even before 00:15:51.200 --> 00:15:53.549 the new skeleton. Now, isotopes is one of those 00:15:53.549 --> 00:15:55.789 science words that makes people's eyes glaze 00:15:55.789 --> 00:15:57.850 over. Can you break it down for me in a simple 00:15:57.850 --> 00:16:00.789 way? Sure. Think of isotopes as a chemical passport 00:16:00.789 --> 00:16:03.889 stamp in your teeth. Oxygen comes in different 00:16:03.889 --> 00:16:07.250 flavors. Isotopes called oxygen 16 and oxygen 00:16:07.250 --> 00:16:10.389 18. The ratio between these two flavors varies 00:16:10.389 --> 00:16:12.309 depending on where the water comes from. How 00:16:12.309 --> 00:16:15.330 so? Well, water evaporating from the ocean has 00:16:15.330 --> 00:16:18.379 a different ratio than fresh river water. which 00:16:18.379 --> 00:16:20.220 is different again from groundwater that land 00:16:20.220 --> 00:16:22.820 animals might drink. When an animal drinks that 00:16:22.820 --> 00:16:26.059 water or eats prey that drank that water, that 00:16:26.059 --> 00:16:28.700 specific oxygen signature gets locked into the 00:16:28.700 --> 00:16:31.080 enamel of their teeth as they grow. So you can 00:16:31.080 --> 00:16:33.279 test a 100 -million -year -old tooth and tell 00:16:33.279 --> 00:16:35.679 me where that animal was getting its water. Essentially, 00:16:35.679 --> 00:16:37.879 yes. It tells you about its environment. And 00:16:37.879 --> 00:16:40.919 when they tested Spinosaurus teeth, the passport 00:16:40.919 --> 00:16:43.259 stamps didn't look like Cartridontosaurus or 00:16:43.259 --> 00:16:45.600 other land dinosaurs from the same area. They 00:16:45.600 --> 00:16:48.460 look like ancient turtles. They look like crocodiles. 00:16:48.559 --> 00:16:50.679 So chemically, this thing is living in the same 00:16:50.679 --> 00:16:53.019 water as the turtles and crocs. It's sinking 00:16:53.019 --> 00:16:55.360 in it. Correct. The chemical evidence strongly 00:16:55.360 --> 00:16:57.820 pointed to an aquatic or semi -aquatic lifestyle. 00:16:58.419 --> 00:17:01.019 But chemistry is one thing. Biomechanics is another. 00:17:01.320 --> 00:17:03.639 The skeptics could still argue, OK, maybe it 00:17:03.639 --> 00:17:06.500 drinks a lot of water or only eats fish, but 00:17:06.500 --> 00:17:09.339 it doesn't mean it swims. They needed anatomical 00:17:09.339 --> 00:17:12.210 proof. Which brings us back to the tail discovery 00:17:12.210 --> 00:17:15.609 in 2020. Describe what they found. Because most 00:17:15.609 --> 00:17:17.609 dinosaur tails are, well, they're stiff, right? 00:17:17.690 --> 00:17:19.990 They're like long, bony counterbalances. Yes. 00:17:20.089 --> 00:17:23.910 Think of a T -Rex tail as a stiff rod with powerful 00:17:23.910 --> 00:17:26.509 muscles at the base. It keeps the animal from 00:17:26.509 --> 00:17:29.750 tipping over. It's tight, rigid, not very flexible 00:17:29.750 --> 00:17:32.630 side to side. But when Ibrahim's team excavated 00:17:32.630 --> 00:17:35.450 the tail of the neotype, it was incredibly flexible. 00:17:35.980 --> 00:17:38.779 Flexible how? It had these ridiculously long, 00:17:38.859 --> 00:17:42.180 thin spines sticking up from the top of the vertebrae 00:17:42.180 --> 00:17:45.880 and equally long bones, called chevrons, hanging 00:17:45.880 --> 00:17:49.779 down from the bottom. It created this deep, vertical, 00:17:49.980 --> 00:17:52.680 blade -like surface area. It looked like a paddle, 00:17:52.819 --> 00:17:55.380 a giant fin. It looked exactly like the tail 00:17:55.380 --> 00:17:57.839 of a modern newt or a crested gecko. It was a 00:17:57.839 --> 00:18:00.880 propulsion system, a caudal fin. And they didn't 00:18:00.880 --> 00:18:03.569 just look at it and guess, right? I love this 00:18:03.569 --> 00:18:05.490 part of the research. They actually built a robot. 00:18:05.730 --> 00:18:08.369 They did. It's brilliant. They worked with engineers 00:18:08.369 --> 00:18:10.970 to create a plastic mechanical model of the tail 00:18:10.970 --> 00:18:14.529 and put it in a water flume to test the thrust 00:18:14.529 --> 00:18:16.390 it could generate compared to other dinosaur 00:18:16.390 --> 00:18:18.690 tails. That's dedication, actually building the 00:18:18.690 --> 00:18:21.609 thing. And the results were staggering. This 00:18:21.609 --> 00:18:24.730 tail produced eight times the forward thrust 00:18:24.730 --> 00:18:28.430 of a standard sauropod tail in water. Eight times. 00:18:28.670 --> 00:18:30.569 It wasn't a counterbalance. It was an engine. 00:18:30.750 --> 00:18:32.960 So that killed the chimera theory, right? You 00:18:32.960 --> 00:18:34.559 don't accidentally find a specialized paddle 00:18:34.559 --> 00:18:37.099 tail on a land animal. It certainly dealt a heavy, 00:18:37.140 --> 00:18:39.940 heavy blow to the chimera theory. It proved that 00:18:39.940 --> 00:18:42.259 at least this individual, the neotype, had a 00:18:42.259 --> 00:18:44.400 tail specifically adapted for moving through 00:18:44.400 --> 00:18:47.640 water. It solidified the idea that Spinosaurus 00:18:47.640 --> 00:18:50.319 was an aquatic pursuit predator chasing fish 00:18:50.319 --> 00:18:53.559 underwater. Case closed. Finally. You would think 00:18:53.559 --> 00:18:56.990 so. But science is never that easy. Just when 00:18:56.990 --> 00:18:59.930 Team Aquatic was doing a victory lap, a new study 00:18:59.930 --> 00:19:03.029 came out in 2022 about bone density that seemed 00:19:03.029 --> 00:19:05.390 to clinch it. But then things got complicated 00:19:05.390 --> 00:19:07.509 all over again. Let's touch on the bone density 00:19:07.509 --> 00:19:09.809 first because that makes intuitive sense to me. 00:19:09.930 --> 00:19:12.150 This is the work of Matteo Fabri and his team. 00:19:12.559 --> 00:19:14.740 He looked at the internal structure of the bones. 00:19:15.099 --> 00:19:18.220 Now, birds and most theropods, like T. rex, have 00:19:18.220 --> 00:19:20.140 hollow bones. They're pneumatic, filled with 00:19:20.140 --> 00:19:22.680 air sacs. To save weight, right. Makes them more 00:19:22.680 --> 00:19:25.599 agile. Right. But if you want to dive, if you 00:19:25.599 --> 00:19:27.980 want to go underwater, hollow bones are terrible. 00:19:28.119 --> 00:19:30.200 You float like a cork. You have to constantly 00:19:30.200 --> 00:19:32.059 fight against your own buoyancy. So you need 00:19:32.059 --> 00:19:33.880 ballast, like a diver wearing a weight belt, 00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:36.619 to help them think. Exactly. And modern diving 00:19:36.619 --> 00:19:39.339 animals have a solution for this called osteosclerosis. 00:19:39.779 --> 00:19:42.910 They have solid... dense bones. Penguins have 00:19:42.910 --> 00:19:46.049 solid bones. Manatees have solid bones. Hippos 00:19:46.049 --> 00:19:49.230 have them. And guess what? Fabry's study showed 00:19:49.230 --> 00:19:52.250 that Spinosaurus has incredibly dense, solid 00:19:52.250 --> 00:19:55.369 bones. So it's built to sink. It's built to submerge. 00:19:55.390 --> 00:19:56.990 This seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. 00:19:57.190 --> 00:19:59.849 We have the isotopes, the paddle tail, and now 00:19:59.849 --> 00:20:02.289 heavy bones for ballast. It's a river monster. 00:20:02.829 --> 00:20:06.109 End of story. But I hear a but coming. There's 00:20:06.109 --> 00:20:08.670 always a but with this animal. Enter Donald Henderson 00:20:08.670 --> 00:20:11.990 and later... David Hohn and Thomas Holtz. These 00:20:11.990 --> 00:20:14.329 are the key figures in the team shoreline or 00:20:14.329 --> 00:20:16.430 team wader camp. And they raise some physics 00:20:16.430 --> 00:20:18.289 problems that are actually really hard to ignore. 00:20:18.509 --> 00:20:20.349 Okay, what's the biggest problem? You mentioned 00:20:20.349 --> 00:20:23.089 the quark earlier. Henderson ran these incredibly 00:20:23.089 --> 00:20:26.009 detailed 3D computer models of the entire animal, 00:20:26.089 --> 00:20:28.690 including the lungs and that massive sail. And 00:20:28.690 --> 00:20:31.369 his conclusion was, even with the heavy bones, 00:20:31.589 --> 00:20:34.210 this animal was too buoyant to dive. Because 00:20:34.210 --> 00:20:36.630 of the lungs. Dinosaurs have massive air sac 00:20:36.630 --> 00:20:38.809 systems connected to their lungs. They are full 00:20:38.809 --> 00:20:41.329 of air. Henderson argued that Spinosaurus would 00:20:41.329 --> 00:20:43.430 be fundamentally unsinkable. It would just bob 00:20:43.430 --> 00:20:45.670 on the surface. Okay, so it's a surface swimmer. 00:20:45.670 --> 00:20:48.470 Is that so bad for the theory? Well, here's the 00:20:48.470 --> 00:20:52.089 second problem. Henderson also modeled its stability 00:20:52.089 --> 00:20:54.069 in the water. And this is where it gets kind 00:20:54.069 --> 00:20:57.170 of funny. Because of that giant sail on its back, 00:20:57.329 --> 00:21:01.470 the center of gravity is very high. Oh, no. Like 00:21:01.470 --> 00:21:04.720 a sailboat with a too heavy mast. Exactly. The 00:21:04.720 --> 00:21:06.960 model showed that if it tried to float or swim 00:21:06.960 --> 00:21:09.299 in deep water, it would be incredibly unstable. 00:21:09.380 --> 00:21:11.859 It would tip over. It would just roll onto its 00:21:11.859 --> 00:21:14.140 side. It would capsize. A 50 -foot predator would 00:21:14.140 --> 00:21:16.440 just capsize. Essentially. It was the unsinkable 00:21:16.440 --> 00:21:19.220 rubber ducky that flips over. So Henderson argued 00:21:19.220 --> 00:21:21.480 it physically couldn't be an agile underwater 00:21:21.480 --> 00:21:24.680 hunter like a crocodile. And then Hohn and Holtz 00:21:24.680 --> 00:21:26.640 brought up the eyes, right? This part really 00:21:26.640 --> 00:21:30.319 stuck with me. It's a very simple, elegant, anatomical 00:21:30.319 --> 00:21:32.740 observation. Look at a crocodile. Or a hippo. 00:21:33.150 --> 00:21:35.250 or any animal that spends a lot of time ambushing 00:21:35.250 --> 00:21:37.869 from the water, where are the eyes and nostrils? 00:21:38.089 --> 00:21:39.950 Right on top of the head, so they can hide their 00:21:39.950 --> 00:21:42.170 whole body underwater and just have their eyes 00:21:42.170 --> 00:21:44.549 and nose peeking out like a periscope. Exactly. 00:21:44.769 --> 00:21:47.450 That's the aquatic ambush design. Now look at 00:21:47.450 --> 00:21:50.089 a Spinosaurus skull. The nostrils are set far 00:21:50.089 --> 00:21:52.289 back on the snout, which is good for being in 00:21:52.289 --> 00:21:55.549 water, but the eyes, they are on the side of 00:21:55.549 --> 00:21:58.170 the head. Normal dinosaur placement. So if it's 00:21:58.170 --> 00:22:00.630 floating low in the water, It can't see anything 00:22:00.630 --> 00:22:02.869 above the surface. And if it wants to breathe 00:22:02.869 --> 00:22:05.390 through those nostrils, it has to stick its whole 00:22:05.390 --> 00:22:07.809 head out of the water. It's just not optimized 00:22:07.809 --> 00:22:11.369 for that stealthy waterline lifestyle. So if 00:22:11.369 --> 00:22:14.089 it's not swimming like a shark and it's not hiding 00:22:14.089 --> 00:22:17.390 like a croc, what is it doing? This is the heron 00:22:17.390 --> 00:22:20.269 model. The bird. The bird. The theory is that 00:22:20.269 --> 00:22:22.769 Spinosaurus wasn't chasing prey deep underwater. 00:22:23.150 --> 00:22:26.700 It was waiting. It stood in the shallows. maybe 00:22:26.700 --> 00:22:29.700 chest deep, and used its long, flexible neck 00:22:29.700 --> 00:22:31.940 and sensor -filled snout to strike down from 00:22:31.940 --> 00:22:34.339 above. Snatching fish without ever getting its 00:22:34.339 --> 00:22:37.400 body fully submerged. Exactly. Hunting like a 00:22:37.400 --> 00:22:39.539 50 -foot grizzly bear swiping salmon out of a 00:22:39.539 --> 00:22:42.339 river or a giant heron. It explains the dense 00:22:42.339 --> 00:22:44.920 bones. It provides stability in moving water. 00:22:45.079 --> 00:22:47.779 It explains the claws for gaffing fish, and it 00:22:47.779 --> 00:22:49.779 completely sidesteps the buoyancy and stability 00:22:49.779 --> 00:22:52.079 problem. But what about the paddle tail? Why 00:22:52.079 --> 00:22:54.140 have a giant motor if you're just standing there? 00:22:54.440 --> 00:22:57.400 Ah, well, another paleontologist, Paul Serino, 00:22:57.539 --> 00:23:01.079 came back into the fray in 2022 with a counterpoint 00:23:01.079 --> 00:23:03.680 to that. He suggested the tail wasn't a motor 00:23:03.680 --> 00:23:06.339 at all. It was a billboard. A billboard? What 00:23:06.339 --> 00:23:09.119 does that even mean? A display structure. He 00:23:09.119 --> 00:23:12.240 argued that this huge, flat tail was for waving 00:23:12.240 --> 00:23:14.319 around to attract mates or intimidate rivals, 00:23:14.480 --> 00:23:16.740 and it just happened to look like a paddle. He 00:23:16.740 --> 00:23:18.920 thinks it was a surface swimmer at best, and 00:23:18.920 --> 00:23:21.500 a slow, unstable one. I love that. In biology, 00:23:21.619 --> 00:23:23.759 if you can't explain it, it's for sex. Display 00:23:23.759 --> 00:23:26.180 is the ultimate catch -all, yes. But honestly, 00:23:26.359 --> 00:23:28.279 the debate is still raging. Was it a clumsy, 00:23:28.400 --> 00:23:31.420 deep -water swimmer? A graceful, shallow water 00:23:31.420 --> 00:23:34.200 waiter? Or something we haven't quite figured 00:23:34.200 --> 00:23:36.799 out yet? Okay, let's try to figure it out by 00:23:36.799 --> 00:23:40.759 looking at the toolkit. Section 4, Anatomy. Let's 00:23:40.759 --> 00:23:43.500 deconstruct this beast, piece by piece. Start 00:23:43.500 --> 00:23:46.450 with the face, the business end. The face is 00:23:46.450 --> 00:23:49.269 undeniable. It is a fish trap. We've talked about 00:23:49.269 --> 00:23:51.730 the teeth. How else does it differ from a T -Rex? 00:23:52.029 --> 00:23:55.109 Well, as we touched on, T -Rex has those steak 00:23:55.109 --> 00:23:58.609 knife teeth, serrated, curved backwards. If a 00:23:58.609 --> 00:24:01.309 T -Rex bites you, it tears huge chunks of flesh 00:24:01.309 --> 00:24:04.170 and crushes bone. Spinosaurus teeth are straight, 00:24:04.329 --> 00:24:07.190 round cones. They are smooth. Like a mouthful 00:24:07.190 --> 00:24:10.069 of thick needles. Precisely. If you bite a slippery, 00:24:10.230 --> 00:24:12.069 wiggling fish with a steak knife, it might tear 00:24:12.069 --> 00:24:14.609 free. If you bite it with a pin cushion, it's 00:24:14.609 --> 00:24:17.670 stuck. And the snout has that rosette, a notch 00:24:17.670 --> 00:24:19.529 near the tip where the biggest teeth from a top 00:24:19.529 --> 00:24:22.109 and bottom jaw interlock. It creates an inescapable 00:24:22.109 --> 00:24:24.390 death grip. And I read about the sixth sense 00:24:24.390 --> 00:24:27.210 in the snout. Yes, the foramina. If you look 00:24:27.210 --> 00:24:29.269 at the skull, the tip of the snout is covered 00:24:29.269 --> 00:24:32.269 in these little holes, or pits. In modern crocodiles 00:24:32.269 --> 00:24:34.589 and alligators, these pits house sensitive pressure 00:24:34.589 --> 00:24:37.309 receptors. They can feel the turbulence of a 00:24:37.309 --> 00:24:39.630 fish swimming by in pitch black, murky water. 00:24:39.849 --> 00:24:41.970 That is terrifying. It doesn't even need to see 00:24:41.970 --> 00:24:44.569 you. It can feel you moving in the water. Precisely. 00:24:45.409 --> 00:24:47.630 So whether it was wading or swimming, it was 00:24:47.630 --> 00:24:50.069 likely hunting by touch as much as by sight. 00:24:50.170 --> 00:24:52.150 It could just dip its snout in the water and 00:24:52.150 --> 00:24:54.789 wait. Okay, now we have to talk about the sail. 00:24:55.690 --> 00:24:58.130 Or the hump. Or whatever it is. The defining 00:24:58.130 --> 00:25:00.309 feature, yeah. The neural spines. These things 00:25:00.309 --> 00:25:03.630 are massive. Ten times the height of the vertebrae 00:25:03.630 --> 00:25:05.630 they're sitting on. Stromer originally thought 00:25:05.630 --> 00:25:08.170 it was a hump, right? Like a camel or a bison. 00:25:08.390 --> 00:25:11.710 He did. He suggested it might be a big hump of 00:25:11.710 --> 00:25:14.079 fat and muscle. Maybe to help the animals survive 00:25:14.079 --> 00:25:17.420 dry seasons when the river shrank. A camelsaurus. 00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:20.299 That's a look. Why don't we think that anymore? 00:25:20.559 --> 00:25:22.299 The bones are just too thin and blade -like. 00:25:22.440 --> 00:25:24.579 If they were supporting a massive heavy hump 00:25:24.579 --> 00:25:27.380 of fat, you'd expect them to be broader and more 00:25:27.380 --> 00:25:30.140 robust at the base to handle the weight. These 00:25:30.140 --> 00:25:32.799 are like thin blades. They likely supported a 00:25:32.799 --> 00:25:35.980 membrane of skin. So a sail, like a Dimetrodon, 00:25:36.099 --> 00:25:38.359 that other sail -backed creature. Exactly, or 00:25:38.359 --> 00:25:40.259 a sailfish. And this brings us back to the function, 00:25:40.400 --> 00:25:42.720 which is another huge debate. The classic theory 00:25:42.720 --> 00:25:45.759 is thermoregulation. Like a biological solar 00:25:45.759 --> 00:25:48.660 panel. Right. It has a huge surface area. You 00:25:48.660 --> 00:25:50.759 turn it to the sun, you flush blood into it to 00:25:50.759 --> 00:25:52.700 warm up quickly in the morning. You turn it to 00:25:52.700 --> 00:25:55.680 the wind to release heat at noon. It's a plausible 00:25:55.680 --> 00:25:58.920 idea. But not the only one. Not at all. There's 00:25:58.920 --> 00:26:01.380 the display theory, of course. making yourself 00:26:01.380 --> 00:26:03.740 look bigger and more impressive to mates or rivals. 00:26:03.920 --> 00:26:06.579 The billboard again. The billboard, yeah. And 00:26:06.579 --> 00:26:09.099 then there's the hydrodynamic theory. A study 00:26:09.099 --> 00:26:12.559 by Gimsa and colleagues in 2015 proposed that 00:26:12.559 --> 00:26:15.099 if Spinosaurus was swimming and thrashing its 00:26:15.099 --> 00:26:17.880 head from side to side to catch fish, its body 00:26:17.880 --> 00:26:21.279 would want to rotate. The sail acts as a keel. 00:26:21.339 --> 00:26:23.829 It keeps the body stable in the water. Like the 00:26:23.829 --> 00:26:26.789 dorsal fin on a shark or an orca. Or a sailfish, 00:26:26.910 --> 00:26:29.750 yes. It allows for precision strikes with the 00:26:29.750 --> 00:26:32.410 head without the whole body rolling over. It's 00:26:32.410 --> 00:26:34.349 a very compelling physics argument, assuming 00:26:34.349 --> 00:26:36.809 the animal swims. It always, always comes back 00:26:36.809 --> 00:26:39.009 to the swimming. It does, but let's zoom out 00:26:39.009 --> 00:26:41.009 for a second. We've been talking about the animal 00:26:41.009 --> 00:26:43.250 as if it lived in a vacuum, but we need to talk 00:26:43.250 --> 00:26:45.430 about the world it lived in, because nothing 00:26:45.430 --> 00:26:47.910 gets this big by accident. This is Section 5, 00:26:48.250 --> 00:26:52.900 The World of Giants, The Paleoecology. We are 00:26:52.900 --> 00:26:55.460 in the Cenomanian stage of the Cretaceous, about 00:26:55.460 --> 00:26:58.839 95 to 100 million years ago, North Africa. But 00:26:58.839 --> 00:27:00.960 not the Sahara Desert we know today. You have 00:27:00.960 --> 00:27:03.640 to erase that image completely. Completely. Erase 00:27:03.640 --> 00:27:05.940 the sand. Think of the Amazon Delta or the Florida 00:27:05.940 --> 00:27:09.440 Everglades, but on a continental scale. Massive 00:27:09.440 --> 00:27:13.279 meandering river systems. Huge tidal flats. Dense 00:27:13.279 --> 00:27:16.039 mangrove forests bordering the ancient Tethys 00:27:16.039 --> 00:27:18.920 Sea. It's hot. It's wet. It's a paradise for 00:27:18.920 --> 00:27:21.140 giant reptiles. And everything there is oversized. 00:27:21.559 --> 00:27:23.779 It is the land of giants. The fish aren't little 00:27:23.779 --> 00:27:26.400 minnows. You have Onchopristus, which is a giant 00:27:26.400 --> 00:27:28.900 sawfish that's eight meters long. A 25 -foot 00:27:28.900 --> 00:27:31.819 sawfish with barbed teeth on its snout. A terrifying 00:27:31.819 --> 00:27:34.700 creature. You have Mausonia, a coacanth the size 00:27:34.700 --> 00:27:37.339 of a minnitan. You have Boeus, a giant predatory 00:27:37.339 --> 00:27:40.099 fish called a butyr. Stinosaurus didn't eat generic 00:27:40.099 --> 00:27:42.529 fish. It ate monsters. And it wasn't... the only 00:27:42.529 --> 00:27:44.509 predator on the block. And this brings us back 00:27:44.509 --> 00:27:47.490 to Stromer's riddle. Right. In a normal ecosystem 00:27:47.490 --> 00:27:50.690 like the Serengeti today, you have tons of grass, 00:27:50.890 --> 00:27:54.069 a huge number of wildebeest and zebra, the herbivores, 00:27:54.269 --> 00:27:57.910 and a tiny number of lions and leopards, the 00:27:57.910 --> 00:28:00.630 carnivores. It's a classic energy pyramid. A 00:28:00.630 --> 00:28:03.170 wide base of plants, fewer plant eaters, and 00:28:03.170 --> 00:28:06.390 very few meat eaters at the top. Exactly. But 00:28:06.390 --> 00:28:08.990 in the Kem Kem beds, the pyramid is inverted, 00:28:09.089 --> 00:28:13.299 or at least it's bizarrely distorted. When paleontologists 00:28:13.299 --> 00:28:15.619 dig there, they find an overabundance of giant 00:28:15.619 --> 00:28:19.460 predator fossils. Spinosaurus. Cartridontosaurus, 00:28:19.700 --> 00:28:21.960 which is a T -Rex -sized, shark -toothed dinosaur. 00:28:22.539 --> 00:28:26.160 Lahariosaurus. Deltadromius. How do four different 00:28:26.160 --> 00:28:28.000 apex predators live in the same neighborhood 00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:30.079 without constantly fighting and driving each 00:28:30.079 --> 00:28:32.619 other to extinction? That's the riddle. And the 00:28:32.619 --> 00:28:35.200 answer is likely a concept called niche partitioning. 00:28:35.200 --> 00:28:37.980 Staying in their lanes. Exactly. Cartrodontosaurus 00:28:37.980 --> 00:28:40.720 has the spake knife teeth and long legs. It's 00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:42.599 built for hunting the giant sauropods on dry 00:28:42.599 --> 00:28:45.099 land. Spinosaurus has the fish trap snout and 00:28:45.099 --> 00:28:47.559 aquatic adaptations. It's hunting the giant fish 00:28:47.559 --> 00:28:49.799 in the river channels. So they aren't competing 00:28:49.799 --> 00:28:51.980 for the same food source? For the most part, 00:28:52.039 --> 00:28:55.079 no. They are like neighbors who work different 00:28:55.079 --> 00:28:57.400 shifts and eat at different restaurants. One 00:28:57.400 --> 00:28:59.220 is the master of the land, the other is the master 00:28:59.220 --> 00:29:02.980 of the water. They might cross paths at the water's 00:29:02.980 --> 00:29:05.240 edge, but they aren't fighting for the same resources. 00:29:05.759 --> 00:29:08.460 That's the only way the ecosystem could support 00:29:08.460 --> 00:29:10.900 that much biomass at the top of the food chain. 00:29:11.079 --> 00:29:14.269 Unless there's a drought. Well, exactly. Isotope 00:29:14.269 --> 00:29:16.210 data suggests Spinosaurus was an opportunist. 00:29:16.289 --> 00:29:18.789 If a drought hit and the river started to dry 00:29:18.789 --> 00:29:21.450 up, it would absolutely come onto land and eat 00:29:21.450 --> 00:29:23.470 whatever it could catch, including other dinosaurs. 00:29:23.750 --> 00:29:26.569 And that's when you get the epic clashes. Speaking 00:29:26.569 --> 00:29:29.950 of clashes, we have to talk about Jurassic Park 00:29:29.950 --> 00:29:32.329 3. We do. It's impossible to talk about Spinosaurus 00:29:32.329 --> 00:29:35.759 without it. Section 6, pop culture. Because for 00:29:35.759 --> 00:29:38.039 most of us, myself included, that movie was the 00:29:38.039 --> 00:29:40.240 grand introduction. It was the debutante ball 00:29:40.240 --> 00:29:43.220 for Spinosaurus. It took it from a paleontological 00:29:43.220 --> 00:29:45.839 curiosity to a household name overnight. And 00:29:45.839 --> 00:29:48.299 it came out swinging, literally. It kills a T 00:29:48.299 --> 00:29:50.599 -Rex in the first act of the movie, snaps its 00:29:50.599 --> 00:29:53.160 neck. Which was a very, very controversial decision 00:29:53.160 --> 00:29:56.339 among dinosaur fans. I remember hating it as 00:29:56.339 --> 00:29:58.500 a kid. I was furious. How dare they peel the 00:29:58.500 --> 00:30:01.720 king? It was an intentional provocation. Jack 00:30:01.720 --> 00:30:04.200 Horner, the paleontologist who advised the film, 00:30:04.299 --> 00:30:07.740 had this theory at the time that T -Rex was actually 00:30:07.740 --> 00:30:10.119 just a slow -moving scavenger. Yeah. He wanted 00:30:10.119 --> 00:30:12.960 to use the movie to push Spinosaurus as the true 00:30:12.960 --> 00:30:15.839 Apex predator. But let's look at that fight with 00:30:15.839 --> 00:30:18.279 what we know now. The Spinosaurus grabs the T 00:30:18.279 --> 00:30:22.220 -Rex's neck and its jaws and just snaps it. Yeah. 00:30:22.259 --> 00:30:25.019 No, that's pure movie monster stuff. No, why 00:30:25.019 --> 00:30:28.279 not? In the movie, the Spinosaurus is this robust, 00:30:28.380 --> 00:30:31.450 long -legged land monster. It can wrestle. But 00:30:31.450 --> 00:30:34.750 in reality, the Spinosaurus jaw is long and narrow. 00:30:34.910 --> 00:30:37.710 It's built for gripping, but it's very weak against 00:30:37.710 --> 00:30:39.890 lateral bending. Lateral bending meaning twisting. 00:30:40.170 --> 00:30:42.470 Exactly. If a Spinosaurus bit a struggling 8 00:30:42.470 --> 00:30:44.569 -ton T -Rex and the T -Rex thrashed its head 00:30:44.569 --> 00:30:46.750 sideways, the Spinosaurus jaw would likely shatter. 00:30:46.849 --> 00:30:49.430 It's just not built for wrestling heavy terrestrial 00:30:49.430 --> 00:30:51.589 prey like that. And the T -Rex? How would it 00:30:51.589 --> 00:30:53.950 fare? The T -Rex has the strongest bite force 00:30:53.950 --> 00:30:56.730 of any terrestrial animal ever recorded. Period. 00:30:57.339 --> 00:31:00.140 If the T -Rex got its bone -crushing jaws around 00:31:00.140 --> 00:31:02.839 the Spinosaurus's much more delicate neck, game 00:31:02.839 --> 00:31:06.119 over. In a lamb battle, the T -Rex wins nine 00:31:06.119 --> 00:31:08.819 times out of ten. So the movie lied to us. The 00:31:08.819 --> 00:31:11.910 movie gave us a spectacular monster. Science 00:31:11.910 --> 00:31:14.390 gives us a fascinating animal. And honestly, 00:31:14.549 --> 00:31:17.470 the real animal, the semi -aquatic, paddle -tailed, 00:31:17.470 --> 00:31:20.509 sensor -snouted wader swimmer, is way more interesting 00:31:20.509 --> 00:31:23.109 than just another bigger T. rex. It's more unique. 00:31:23.150 --> 00:31:25.029 It's a completely different kind of predator. 00:31:25.309 --> 00:31:27.369 It's an evolutionary experiment that pushed the 00:31:27.369 --> 00:31:29.769 boundaries of what a dinosaur could be. It was 00:31:29.769 --> 00:31:32.630 trying to become a whale or a crocodile millions 00:31:32.630 --> 00:31:35.089 of years before them. And that brings us to the 00:31:35.089 --> 00:31:38.250 outro, the unfinished puzzle. Because even after 00:31:38.250 --> 00:31:41.009 this entire deep dive, we still don't really 00:31:41.009 --> 00:31:43.069 know for sure what it looked like or how it lived. 00:31:43.230 --> 00:31:45.829 We don't. The neotype is great, but it's still 00:31:45.829 --> 00:31:48.710 fragmentary. The tail was a huge leap forward, 00:31:48.809 --> 00:31:51.450 but the biomechanics are still fiercely argued. 00:31:51.609 --> 00:31:53.769 It's a constantly shifting picture. And there's 00:31:53.769 --> 00:31:55.769 still that whisper of the chimera, isn't there? 00:31:55.869 --> 00:31:58.410 That ghost in the machine? It's the ghost that 00:31:58.410 --> 00:32:02.049 haunts the data. Is it possible that we are mixing... 00:32:02.279 --> 00:32:04.460 Spinosaurus bones with Sigilmasasaurus bones. 00:32:04.720 --> 00:32:06.859 Is it possible that the short legs belong to 00:32:06.859 --> 00:32:09.779 one species and the giant spine belongs to another 00:32:09.779 --> 00:32:12.339 very similar species? We might be building a 00:32:12.339 --> 00:32:14.380 dragon out of spare parts from two different 00:32:14.380 --> 00:32:17.160 closets. It's probably unlikely, given how the 00:32:17.160 --> 00:32:19.660 specimens were associated in the ground. But 00:32:19.660 --> 00:32:22.420 until we find a complete, fully articulated skeleton 00:32:22.420 --> 00:32:26.140 head to tail, all in one piece, there will always 00:32:26.140 --> 00:32:28.200 be a sliver of a doubt. That's the fragility 00:32:28.200 --> 00:32:30.359 of it, isn't it? We build these entire worlds, 00:32:30.420 --> 00:32:32.960 these entire documentaries and movies based on 00:32:32.960 --> 00:32:36.099 fragments and educated guesses. We do. But that's 00:32:36.099 --> 00:32:38.259 the beauty and the frustration of paleontology. 00:32:38.440 --> 00:32:41.019 We are trying to reconstruct a puzzle where half 00:32:41.019 --> 00:32:43.640 the pieces are missing and the box top was burned 00:32:43.640 --> 00:32:46.410 in a fire in 1944. I want to leave the listener 00:32:46.410 --> 00:32:48.609 with one final provocative thought you mentioned 00:32:48.609 --> 00:32:50.390 in the pre -show because it really blew my mind. 00:32:50.410 --> 00:32:53.670 The soft tissue. Ah, yes. The parts that don't 00:32:53.670 --> 00:32:55.710 fossilize. We focus so much on the bones, but 00:32:55.710 --> 00:32:59.009 bones are just the scaffold. Right. Think about 00:32:59.009 --> 00:33:01.630 an elephant. If you only had an elephant skull, 00:33:01.910 --> 00:33:04.349 you would never guess it had a long, flexible 00:33:04.349 --> 00:33:07.569 trunk. You'd just see a weird big hole in the 00:33:07.569 --> 00:33:09.309 middle of its face and wonder what it was for. 00:33:09.650 --> 00:33:12.349 So what are we missing on Spinosaurus? What's 00:33:12.349 --> 00:33:15.119 the trunk? The sail. We assume it was just skin 00:33:15.119 --> 00:33:16.779 on bone because that's what we see in lizards. 00:33:16.960 --> 00:33:19.759 But what if it was thick? What if it was a muscle 00:33:19.759 --> 00:33:22.859 attachment for a massive, powerful neck? Or, 00:33:22.940 --> 00:33:27.019 here's a wild one, what if the sail was a framework 00:33:27.019 --> 00:33:30.200 for a complex sensory array, like an antenna? 00:33:30.460 --> 00:33:33.039 Like a biological radar dish to sense vibrations 00:33:33.039 --> 00:33:35.619 in the water. Or what if it was brightly colored 00:33:35.619 --> 00:33:38.730 for display in ways we can't even imagine? What 00:33:38.730 --> 00:33:41.410 if this snout had soft tissue structures, like 00:33:41.410 --> 00:33:44.170 a fleshy wattle or a crest, that rotted away 00:33:44.170 --> 00:33:46.650 100 million years ago? We might be looking at 00:33:46.650 --> 00:33:48.509 the skeleton of a peacock and drawing a turkey. 00:33:48.730 --> 00:33:51.569 We almost certainly are. The real Spinosaurus 00:33:51.569 --> 00:33:54.890 was probably stranger, more colorful, and more 00:33:54.890 --> 00:33:56.690 complex than anything we've managed to draw so 00:33:56.690 --> 00:33:59.690 far. We've only seen the ghost. Well, on that 00:33:59.690 --> 00:34:01.529 note, I think I'm going to go stare at a picture 00:34:01.529 --> 00:34:03.609 of a heron and try to imagine it with a six -foot 00:34:03.609 --> 00:34:06.039 sail. That's a good place to start. thanks for 00:34:06.039 --> 00:34:07.900 diving deep with us always a pleasure