You know, when we talk about dinosaurs, we usually
talk about them like they are statues. Points
in history, yeah. Right. You picture a T -Rex,
and it's always a T -Rex. Big head, tiny arms,
angry eyebrows. The science on the silhouette
is pretty much settled. But then I start looking
into the sources you sent over for this deep
dive, and I realize there is one massive exception
to that rule. Oh, yeah. The shapeshifter. Just
binosaurus. It really is the problem child of
paleontology. It just refuses to sit still. It's
wild. If you look at a textbook from, say, the
1980s, then you watch Jurassic Park 3rd from
2001, and then you read a paper from 2020, you
are looking at three completely different animals.
Complete. It goes from this generic... T -Rex
with a sail to a short -legged, almost dachshund
-like creature, and then to a full -blown river
monster with a paddle tail. And that's what makes
this specific deep dive so interesting. We aren't
just talking about a set of bones here. We're
tracking a 100 -year -old detective story. A
detective story that involves World War II bombings.
That part of the source material just floored
me. It involves the Royal Air Force, eccentric
German aristocrats, secret deals in the Moroccan
desert, and... what can only be described as
a modern day academic civil war. Civil war feels
appropriate given the tone of some of these papers
I was reading. They are not pulling punches.
Oh, it gets heated. You have paleontologists
publicly calling each other's work a chimera,
which is, you know, fighting words in this field.
Okay, so here's the mission for today then. We
need to figure out how the largest carnivorous
dinosaur ever discovered, and yes, the sources
are clear, it was bigger than T -Rex, bigger
than Giganotosaurus. Longer anyway. The wait
is a whole other debate. Right, longer. How did
this thing go from a pile of destroyed fragments
to the aquatic predator we think we know today?
And as we do that, we have to unpack Stromer's
riddle. Which is, I saw that phrase pop up a
lot. It's his ecological impossibility. The fossil
beds where we find Spinosaurus are just choked
with giant predators. So the riddle is, how do
you have an ecosystem that supports three or
four different giant carnivores at the same time?
The math just doesn't work. It's like having
lions, tigers, and grizzly bears all hunting
in the same square mile. Exactly. It shouldn't
be possible. Or at least it shouldn't be. Okay,
I definitely want to get to the math on that.
But first, we have to go back. Way back. Before
the movies, before the computer models, we need
to go to 1912. To the golden age of digging,
yeah. The protagonist of this part of the story
is... Ernst Stromer. Ernst Freier Stromer von
Reichenbach, to be precise. A bit of a mouthful.
He was a German aristocrat, a paleontologist,
and honestly, a man obsessed. He wasn't looking
in the usual places at the time. Everyone was
digging in North America, you know, the bone
wars, looking for... T -Rex and Triceratops.
Stromer went to Egypt. Specifically the Baharia
Formation in the Western Desert. And just to
set the scene for you listening, this isn't a
comfortable dig. We're not talking about a university
team with modern equipment. No, absolutely not.
This is 1912. There's no GPS, no satellite phones,
no air -conditioned SUVs. It's you, a local team,
a string of camels, and the heat. And the Baharia
Formation isn't just sand. It's this complex...
baked system of ancient mangrove swamps that
have turned to rock. It's brutal work. And it's
there that he finds it, or rather his collector,
Richard Markgraf, finds it for him. Right. Markgraf
was an Austrian fossil collector who had this
incredible knack for finding things no one else
could. He was Stromer's man on the ground. And
in 1912, they unearthed the specimen that they
cataloged as BSP 1912 -819. Catch your name.
We'll call it the holotype. Please. It's the
single most important specimen, the one that
defines the species. Now, when I read the inventory
of what they found, it didn't seem like much
at first glance. A lower jaw, some teeth, and
some vertebrae. But then I looked at the measurements
from Stromer's notes. The scale is just... Yeah.
It's hard to wrap your head around, even now.
The spine sticking out of the backbone? The dorsal
neural spines, yes. They were up to 1 .65 meters
long. Which is about five and a half feet. That's
a person. That's a whole human being in height
just sticking straight up out of the animal's
back. Exactly. And Stromer knew immediately he
had something weird. In 1915, he publishes the
description and names it Spinosaurus aegyptiacus,
the spine lizard of Egypt. But here's the key
insight from Stromer's original notes, which
is just brilliant for the time. He focused on
the jaw. Because it wasn't a T -Rex jaw. Not
even close. Tyrannosaurus has a broad... U -shaped
crushing snout. Yeah. It's a bone breaker. Stromer
saw that Spinosaurus had this long, narrow snout,
almost like a crocodile. And the teeth were different
too, right? Totally different. They weren't serrated,
steak -nized like a T -Rex's. They were cones.
Cones, like crocodile teeth. Very similar. Unserrated,
perfectly conical. They were for gripping, not
slicing. They were designed to puncture and hold
onto something slippery. A fish. That was his
hypothesis. So even in 1915, Stromer is scratching
his head thinking, this is a giant predator,
but it's built... different. It's not playing
the same game as the others. But here's the problem,
and this is where the shapeshifting really starts.
He didn't find the legs, did he? No legs, no
pelvis, no arms, no tail, really. Just the spine,
parts of the jaw, and a few other scraps. It
was a tantalizingly incomplete picture. So what
did he do? He had this amazing discovery, but
couldn't really show people what it looked like.
Well, he did what scientists often did back then
and still do, really. He extrapolated. In 1936,
he wanted to build a mount for the museum in
Munich, the Paleontologist's Museum. He has this
massive spine, this long jaw, but he needs it
to stand up. So he needed to fill in the blanks.
He had to. So he looked at what he knew. The
big two -legged predators from North America
like Tyrannosaurus and Gorgosaurus. He copy -pasted.
Essentially, he grafted the robust long hind
legs of a classic terrestrial predator onto this
weird fish -eating sail -backed creature. Yeah.
He made it a standard issue monster. And that
created the image that stuck for 50 years, the
Godzilla with a fin look. It became the canonical
image. That mount was the only Spinosaurus the
world had. But that mount. That physical representation
of the animal. It had a target on its back. We
have to talk about Munich. We do. This is the
absolute tragedy of the story. It's a gut punch.
It's 1944. World War II is at its peak. And the
Spinosaurus is sitting in the museum in Munich.
Now, usually, museums move their best stuff to
salt mines or caves during wartime, right? To
protect them from air raids. That was standard
protocol. The Louvre did it. The British Museum
did it. And Stromer begged for it. He pleaded
with the museum director to move the Spinosaurus
and all the other priceless Baharia fossils to
safety. But the director said no. Why? Why would
you risk a one -of -a -kind fossil? Politics.
Petty, dangerous politics. Stromer was an aristocrat,
an old -school German intellectual, but he was
not a fan of the Nazi regime. He was openly critical,
and his sons had run -ins with the party. And
the museum director? The director, on the other
hand, was a fervent party member. There's a deep
personal and political feud between them. So
because Stromer wouldn't tow the party line,
the director decided to gamble with the fossils.
He refused to authorize a transport. He basically
said they were safe where they were and that
moving them was too much trouble. He left them
right in the city center. And then came the night
of April 24th, 1944. The British Royal Air Force
launched a massive bombing raid on Munich. It
was part of the strategic bombing campaign to
cripple German infrastructure. I tried to find
photos of the aftermath and the notes he sent.
It's just rubble. The whole area was flattened.
Total destruction. The museum took a direct hit.
The entire building was gutted by fire and explosives.
The holotype, the only known skeleton of Spinosaurus
in the entire world, was incinerated. That's
hard to process. Imagine if we lost the Mona
Lisa and the only proof we had that it ever existed
were a few sketches and a black and white photo.
That is exactly the situation paleontology was
left in. For the next 50 years, Spinosaurus ceased
to exist as a physical object. It became a ghost.
It lived entirely in Stromer's detailed monographs
and a few photographs that, ironically, were
rediscovered in family archives much, much later
in the 90s. So for half a century, anyone drawing
a dinosaur book or making a toy just had to guess
based on Stromer's old Frankenstein reconstruction?
Yes. That was the only data we had. And that's
why if you grew up in the 80s or 90s, your toy
Spinosaurus looked like a generic meat eater
with a sail. Yeah. We literally didn't know any
better because the evidence had turned to ash.
But a ghost doesn't stay dead forever, not in
paleontology anyway. No. Nature has a way of
resurfacing. The story wasn't over. This brings
us to the resurrection, the second act. But interestingly,
the first clue didn't come from Egypt. It came
from a clay pit in Surrey, England. Of all places,
yeah. the rainy English countryside. Tell me
about the Baryonyx. This seems like a key piece
of the puzzle. So it's 1986. An amateur fossil
hunter finds this giant claw that leads to a
dig, and they unearth a new dinosaur called Baryonyx.
It's much smaller than Spinosaurus, maybe 30
feet long, but it's weird. It has that same long
crocodile -like snout. It has a massive hooked
claw on its hand. And the really important part.
And crucially... Inside the stomach region of
the fossil, they found acid -etched fish scales.
The smoking gun. It ate fish. It was a piscivore.
Unequivocally. So baleontologists looked at baryonyx,
then they dusted off Stromer's old drawings from
1915, and the light bulb went on. They realized,
wait a minute, these animals are cousins. So
Spinosaurus wasn't a T -Rex relative. It was
part of this whole other family of river -haunting
weirdos. Spinosauridae family. This changed the
game. It reframed the entire question. It meant
we weren't looking for a... land predator that
happened to have a sail. We were looking for
a specialized water -loving animal. But we still
didn't have the bones. We just had the cousin.
It's like trying to describe a tiger when all
you've ever seen is a house cat. Exactly. We
needed a new Spinosaurus. And that meant going
back to the desert. But not Egypt this time.
The political situation was difficult. This time,
the action shifts to the kembeds in Morocco.
Right. And you see a lot of confusion in the
sources from this period. New names start popping
up like Spinosaurus, Moroccanus, Sigilmassosaurus.
What was going on there? It's the lumper versus
splitter debate. It's a classic paleontological
argument. When you find a slightly different
bone, is it a whole new species? Are you a splitter?
Or is it just individual variation within the
same species? Are you a lumper? The Moroccan
fossils were fragmentary. So for a while it was
chaos. Okay. So into this chaos steps Nizar Ibrahim.
And this is where the story turns into a bit
of an Indiana Jones script. Nizar is a fantastic
paleontologist and a great storyteller. In the
mid -2000s, he was doing fieldwork in Morocco.
The chem beds are difficult. It's a red sandstone
formation, very steep slopes. And unlike the
sterile scientific digs of North America, there's
a huge commercial fossil trade there. So you
have locals digging for fossils to sell to tourists
and collectors. Exactly. It's a source of income.
So the science is often racing against the market.
Nizar was in a town called Erfud, a hub for this
trade, and a local fossil dealer showed him a
cardboard box with some fragments. Just bits
and pieces. A spine covered in a very particular
sediment, a piece of a jaw. Nizar thought they
looked interesting, maybe spinosaurid, but he
didn't have the context. He took some notes and
moved on. Fast forward a year, or a bit more.
He's in a museum in Milan, Italy, and the curators
there show him some new acquisitions they got
from a dealer. Partial skeleton. He looks at
them and he gets this intense sense of deja vu.
He recognizes the bones. Not just the bones.
The rock they're in. The sediment on the bones.
The color of the sandstone. It perfectly matched
the fragments he saw in that cardboard box in
the desert a year earlier. He realized they were
from the same animal. The dealer had sold different
parts of one skeleton to different buyers. He
suspected it. But to prove it? And more importantly,
to find the rest of the skeleton, he had to find
that one specific dealer in the middle of the
Moroccan desert, a man he'd met only once, briefly.
That seems impossible. I'm looking for a guy
with a mustache who showed me a rock a year ago.
It was a total needle in a haystack. But he went
back. He and his team sat in tea shops and their
food. They showed pictures. They asked around.
And miraculously, against all odds, he found
the man. Wow. And the man remembered where he
found the bones. He did. He took Nisar to the
exact hillside they started digging, and there
they found it. More bones from the same individual.
Specimen FSAKKK111888. The neotype. The successor
to the lost throne of the holotype. The first
reasonably complete skeleton since the bombing
of Munich. And this time, it had legs. And this
is where the bomb drops, because when they put
those legs on the skeleton... It didn't look
like the movie monster. It didn't even look like
Stromer's monster. It looked wrong. To everyone
who saw it, it looked broken. The legs were tiny.
How tiny are we talking? Disproportionately short.
If you look at a T -Rex, the legs are long, powerful
pillars designed to hold up tons of weight. This
thing had short, almost dub -behind legs like
a bulldog's. And the pelvis was small. The center
of gravity was way forward over the chest. So
if it tried to walk on two legs, like in Jurassic
Park... It would faceplant. The physics just
don't work. It simply couldn't balance bipedally
on land for any length of time. So Ibrahim and
his team published this huge paper in 2014, and
they make a radical claim. They say, this isn't
a land predator. It's a quadruped. It walks on
four legs. And they went further. They said it
was semi -aquatic, not just eating fish from
the bank, but actually living in the water. This
was a paradigm shift. I remember when this news
hit, the internet went crazy. People were, let's
say, not happy with the Dachshundino. It upset
the apple cart. You have to understand, we love
our monsters. We want Spinosaurus to be this
terrifying kaiju. And suddenly, science is telling
us it's a giant, wet, short -legged salamander
thing. And the scientific pushback was immediate,
right? It wasn't just fanboys on the internet.
Oh no, serious heavy hitters weighed in. Scott
Hartman, John Hutchinson, these are experts in
biomechanics. They looked at the measurements
from the paper and said, hold on. Are you sure
these bones belong to the same animal? The chimera
theory. Exactly. This is a crucial concept. In
paleontology, a chimera is when you accidentally
mix bones from two different animals, or even
two different individuals of different sizes,
and build a creature that never existed. Because
the chem beds are basically a prehistoric river
delta, right? Rivers wash things together. Precisely.
It's a jumble. You find a pile of bones. You
assume it's one individual. But what if the spine
is from a giant adult Spinosaurus and the legs
are from a much smaller juvenile? Or what if
they're from a different related species entirely,
like Sigil massasaurus? If you put baby legs
on a giant adult, you get a short -legged weirdo.
Correct. So the skeptics said, this animal doesn't
make biomechanical sense. It's probably a mistake.
You've mixed up the bones. So we have a war.
Team aquatic, quadruped versus team chimera.
And for a few years, it was a stalemate. A real
scientific deadlock. It was. Until 2020. Because
Nizar Ibrahim went back to that same hill in
Morocco, and he found the one bone that changes
everything. The tail. The tail. It was unlike
any dinosaur tail anyone had ever seen. But before
we get to the tail, we need to take a quick step
sideways into the chemistry. Because even before
they found the tail, there was something in the
teeth that suggested this animal wasn't walking
on land. Right, the oxygen isotopes. This was
Romain Amiotte's work back in 2010, even before
the new skeleton. Now, isotopes is one of those
science words that makes people's eyes glaze
over. Can you break it down for me in a simple
way? Sure. Think of isotopes as a chemical passport
stamp in your teeth. Oxygen comes in different
flavors. Isotopes called oxygen 16 and oxygen
18. The ratio between these two flavors varies
depending on where the water comes from. How
so? Well, water evaporating from the ocean has
a different ratio than fresh river water. which
is different again from groundwater that land
animals might drink. When an animal drinks that
water or eats prey that drank that water, that
specific oxygen signature gets locked into the
enamel of their teeth as they grow. So you can
test a 100 -million -year -old tooth and tell
me where that animal was getting its water. Essentially,
yes. It tells you about its environment. And
when they tested Spinosaurus teeth, the passport
stamps didn't look like Cartridontosaurus or
other land dinosaurs from the same area. They
look like ancient turtles. They look like crocodiles.
So chemically, this thing is living in the same
water as the turtles and crocs. It's sinking
in it. Correct. The chemical evidence strongly
pointed to an aquatic or semi -aquatic lifestyle.
But chemistry is one thing. Biomechanics is another.
The skeptics could still argue, OK, maybe it
drinks a lot of water or only eats fish, but
it doesn't mean it swims. They needed anatomical
proof. Which brings us back to the tail discovery
in 2020. Describe what they found. Because most
dinosaur tails are, well, they're stiff, right?
They're like long, bony counterbalances. Yes.
Think of a T -Rex tail as a stiff rod with powerful
muscles at the base. It keeps the animal from
tipping over. It's tight, rigid, not very flexible
side to side. But when Ibrahim's team excavated
the tail of the neotype, it was incredibly flexible.
Flexible how? It had these ridiculously long,
thin spines sticking up from the top of the vertebrae
and equally long bones, called chevrons, hanging
down from the bottom. It created this deep, vertical,
blade -like surface area. It looked like a paddle,
a giant fin. It looked exactly like the tail
of a modern newt or a crested gecko. It was a
propulsion system, a caudal fin. And they didn't
just look at it and guess, right? I love this
part of the research. They actually built a robot.
They did. It's brilliant. They worked with engineers
to create a plastic mechanical model of the tail
and put it in a water flume to test the thrust
it could generate compared to other dinosaur
tails. That's dedication, actually building the
thing. And the results were staggering. This
tail produced eight times the forward thrust
of a standard sauropod tail in water. Eight times.
It wasn't a counterbalance. It was an engine.
So that killed the chimera theory, right? You
don't accidentally find a specialized paddle
tail on a land animal. It certainly dealt a heavy,
heavy blow to the chimera theory. It proved that
at least this individual, the neotype, had a
tail specifically adapted for moving through
water. It solidified the idea that Spinosaurus
was an aquatic pursuit predator chasing fish
underwater. Case closed. Finally. You would think
so. But science is never that easy. Just when
Team Aquatic was doing a victory lap, a new study
came out in 2022 about bone density that seemed
to clinch it. But then things got complicated
all over again. Let's touch on the bone density
first because that makes intuitive sense to me.
This is the work of Matteo Fabri and his team.
He looked at the internal structure of the bones.
Now, birds and most theropods, like T. rex, have
hollow bones. They're pneumatic, filled with
air sacs. To save weight, right. Makes them more
agile. Right. But if you want to dive, if you
want to go underwater, hollow bones are terrible.
You float like a cork. You have to constantly
fight against your own buoyancy. So you need
ballast, like a diver wearing a weight belt,
to help them think. Exactly. And modern diving
animals have a solution for this called osteosclerosis.
They have solid... dense bones. Penguins have
solid bones. Manatees have solid bones. Hippos
have them. And guess what? Fabry's study showed
that Spinosaurus has incredibly dense, solid
bones. So it's built to sink. It's built to submerge.
This seemed to be the final nail in the coffin.
We have the isotopes, the paddle tail, and now
heavy bones for ballast. It's a river monster.
End of story. But I hear a but coming. There's
always a but with this animal. Enter Donald Henderson
and later... David Hohn and Thomas Holtz. These
are the key figures in the team shoreline or
team wader camp. And they raise some physics
problems that are actually really hard to ignore.
Okay, what's the biggest problem? You mentioned
the quark earlier. Henderson ran these incredibly
detailed 3D computer models of the entire animal,
including the lungs and that massive sail. And
his conclusion was, even with the heavy bones,
this animal was too buoyant to dive. Because
of the lungs. Dinosaurs have massive air sac
systems connected to their lungs. They are full
of air. Henderson argued that Spinosaurus would
be fundamentally unsinkable. It would just bob
on the surface. Okay, so it's a surface swimmer.
Is that so bad for the theory? Well, here's the
second problem. Henderson also modeled its stability
in the water. And this is where it gets kind
of funny. Because of that giant sail on its back,
the center of gravity is very high. Oh, no. Like
a sailboat with a too heavy mast. Exactly. The
model showed that if it tried to float or swim
in deep water, it would be incredibly unstable.
It would tip over. It would just roll onto its
side. It would capsize. A 50 -foot predator would
just capsize. Essentially. It was the unsinkable
rubber ducky that flips over. So Henderson argued
it physically couldn't be an agile underwater
hunter like a crocodile. And then Hohn and Holtz
brought up the eyes, right? This part really
stuck with me. It's a very simple, elegant, anatomical
observation. Look at a crocodile. Or a hippo.
or any animal that spends a lot of time ambushing
from the water, where are the eyes and nostrils?
Right on top of the head, so they can hide their
whole body underwater and just have their eyes
and nose peeking out like a periscope. Exactly.
That's the aquatic ambush design. Now look at
a Spinosaurus skull. The nostrils are set far
back on the snout, which is good for being in
water, but the eyes, they are on the side of
the head. Normal dinosaur placement. So if it's
floating low in the water, It can't see anything
above the surface. And if it wants to breathe
through those nostrils, it has to stick its whole
head out of the water. It's just not optimized
for that stealthy waterline lifestyle. So if
it's not swimming like a shark and it's not hiding
like a croc, what is it doing? This is the heron
model. The bird. The bird. The theory is that
Spinosaurus wasn't chasing prey deep underwater.
It was waiting. It stood in the shallows. maybe
chest deep, and used its long, flexible neck
and sensor -filled snout to strike down from
above. Snatching fish without ever getting its
body fully submerged. Exactly. Hunting like a
50 -foot grizzly bear swiping salmon out of a
river or a giant heron. It explains the dense
bones. It provides stability in moving water.
It explains the claws for gaffing fish, and it
completely sidesteps the buoyancy and stability
problem. But what about the paddle tail? Why
have a giant motor if you're just standing there?
Ah, well, another paleontologist, Paul Serino,
came back into the fray in 2022 with a counterpoint
to that. He suggested the tail wasn't a motor
at all. It was a billboard. A billboard? What
does that even mean? A display structure. He
argued that this huge, flat tail was for waving
around to attract mates or intimidate rivals,
and it just happened to look like a paddle. He
thinks it was a surface swimmer at best, and
a slow, unstable one. I love that. In biology,
if you can't explain it, it's for sex. Display
is the ultimate catch -all, yes. But honestly,
the debate is still raging. Was it a clumsy,
deep -water swimmer? A graceful, shallow water
waiter? Or something we haven't quite figured
out yet? Okay, let's try to figure it out by
looking at the toolkit. Section 4, Anatomy. Let's
deconstruct this beast, piece by piece. Start
with the face, the business end. The face is
undeniable. It is a fish trap. We've talked about
the teeth. How else does it differ from a T -Rex?
Well, as we touched on, T -Rex has those steak
knife teeth, serrated, curved backwards. If a
T -Rex bites you, it tears huge chunks of flesh
and crushes bone. Spinosaurus teeth are straight,
round cones. They are smooth. Like a mouthful
of thick needles. Precisely. If you bite a slippery,
wiggling fish with a steak knife, it might tear
free. If you bite it with a pin cushion, it's
stuck. And the snout has that rosette, a notch
near the tip where the biggest teeth from a top
and bottom jaw interlock. It creates an inescapable
death grip. And I read about the sixth sense
in the snout. Yes, the foramina. If you look
at the skull, the tip of the snout is covered
in these little holes, or pits. In modern crocodiles
and alligators, these pits house sensitive pressure
receptors. They can feel the turbulence of a
fish swimming by in pitch black, murky water.
That is terrifying. It doesn't even need to see
you. It can feel you moving in the water. Precisely.
So whether it was wading or swimming, it was
likely hunting by touch as much as by sight.
It could just dip its snout in the water and
wait. Okay, now we have to talk about the sail.
Or the hump. Or whatever it is. The defining
feature, yeah. The neural spines. These things
are massive. Ten times the height of the vertebrae
they're sitting on. Stromer originally thought
it was a hump, right? Like a camel or a bison.
He did. He suggested it might be a big hump of
fat and muscle. Maybe to help the animals survive
dry seasons when the river shrank. A camelsaurus.
That's a look. Why don't we think that anymore?
The bones are just too thin and blade -like.
If they were supporting a massive heavy hump
of fat, you'd expect them to be broader and more
robust at the base to handle the weight. These
are like thin blades. They likely supported a
membrane of skin. So a sail, like a Dimetrodon,
that other sail -backed creature. Exactly, or
a sailfish. And this brings us back to the function,
which is another huge debate. The classic theory
is thermoregulation. Like a biological solar
panel. Right. It has a huge surface area. You
turn it to the sun, you flush blood into it to
warm up quickly in the morning. You turn it to
the wind to release heat at noon. It's a plausible
idea. But not the only one. Not at all. There's
the display theory, of course. making yourself
look bigger and more impressive to mates or rivals.
The billboard again. The billboard, yeah. And
then there's the hydrodynamic theory. A study
by Gimsa and colleagues in 2015 proposed that
if Spinosaurus was swimming and thrashing its
head from side to side to catch fish, its body
would want to rotate. The sail acts as a keel.
It keeps the body stable in the water. Like the
dorsal fin on a shark or an orca. Or a sailfish,
yes. It allows for precision strikes with the
head without the whole body rolling over. It's
a very compelling physics argument, assuming
the animal swims. It always, always comes back
to the swimming. It does, but let's zoom out
for a second. We've been talking about the animal
as if it lived in a vacuum, but we need to talk
about the world it lived in, because nothing
gets this big by accident. This is Section 5,
The World of Giants, The Paleoecology. We are
in the Cenomanian stage of the Cretaceous, about
95 to 100 million years ago, North Africa. But
not the Sahara Desert we know today. You have
to erase that image completely. Completely. Erase
the sand. Think of the Amazon Delta or the Florida
Everglades, but on a continental scale. Massive
meandering river systems. Huge tidal flats. Dense
mangrove forests bordering the ancient Tethys
Sea. It's hot. It's wet. It's a paradise for
giant reptiles. And everything there is oversized.
It is the land of giants. The fish aren't little
minnows. You have Onchopristus, which is a giant
sawfish that's eight meters long. A 25 -foot
sawfish with barbed teeth on its snout. A terrifying
creature. You have Mausonia, a coacanth the size
of a minnitan. You have Boeus, a giant predatory
fish called a butyr. Stinosaurus didn't eat generic
fish. It ate monsters. And it wasn't... the only
predator on the block. And this brings us back
to Stromer's riddle. Right. In a normal ecosystem
like the Serengeti today, you have tons of grass,
a huge number of wildebeest and zebra, the herbivores,
and a tiny number of lions and leopards, the
carnivores. It's a classic energy pyramid. A
wide base of plants, fewer plant eaters, and
very few meat eaters at the top. Exactly. But
in the Kem Kem beds, the pyramid is inverted,
or at least it's bizarrely distorted. When paleontologists
dig there, they find an overabundance of giant
predator fossils. Spinosaurus. Cartridontosaurus,
which is a T -Rex -sized, shark -toothed dinosaur.
Lahariosaurus. Deltadromius. How do four different
apex predators live in the same neighborhood
without constantly fighting and driving each
other to extinction? That's the riddle. And the
answer is likely a concept called niche partitioning.
Staying in their lanes. Exactly. Cartrodontosaurus
has the spake knife teeth and long legs. It's
built for hunting the giant sauropods on dry
land. Spinosaurus has the fish trap snout and
aquatic adaptations. It's hunting the giant fish
in the river channels. So they aren't competing
for the same food source? For the most part,
no. They are like neighbors who work different
shifts and eat at different restaurants. One
is the master of the land, the other is the master
of the water. They might cross paths at the water's
edge, but they aren't fighting for the same resources.
That's the only way the ecosystem could support
that much biomass at the top of the food chain.
Unless there's a drought. Well, exactly. Isotope
data suggests Spinosaurus was an opportunist.
If a drought hit and the river started to dry
up, it would absolutely come onto land and eat
whatever it could catch, including other dinosaurs.
And that's when you get the epic clashes. Speaking
of clashes, we have to talk about Jurassic Park
3. We do. It's impossible to talk about Spinosaurus
without it. Section 6, pop culture. Because for
most of us, myself included, that movie was the
grand introduction. It was the debutante ball
for Spinosaurus. It took it from a paleontological
curiosity to a household name overnight. And
it came out swinging, literally. It kills a T
-Rex in the first act of the movie, snaps its
neck. Which was a very, very controversial decision
among dinosaur fans. I remember hating it as
a kid. I was furious. How dare they peel the
king? It was an intentional provocation. Jack
Horner, the paleontologist who advised the film,
had this theory at the time that T -Rex was actually
just a slow -moving scavenger. Yeah. He wanted
to use the movie to push Spinosaurus as the true
Apex predator. But let's look at that fight with
what we know now. The Spinosaurus grabs the T
-Rex's neck and its jaws and just snaps it. Yeah.
No, that's pure movie monster stuff. No, why
not? In the movie, the Spinosaurus is this robust,
long -legged land monster. It can wrestle. But
in reality, the Spinosaurus jaw is long and narrow.
It's built for gripping, but it's very weak against
lateral bending. Lateral bending meaning twisting.
Exactly. If a Spinosaurus bit a struggling 8
-ton T -Rex and the T -Rex thrashed its head
sideways, the Spinosaurus jaw would likely shatter.
It's just not built for wrestling heavy terrestrial
prey like that. And the T -Rex? How would it
fare? The T -Rex has the strongest bite force
of any terrestrial animal ever recorded. Period.
If the T -Rex got its bone -crushing jaws around
the Spinosaurus's much more delicate neck, game
over. In a lamb battle, the T -Rex wins nine
times out of ten. So the movie lied to us. The
movie gave us a spectacular monster. Science
gives us a fascinating animal. And honestly,
the real animal, the semi -aquatic, paddle -tailed,
sensor -snouted wader swimmer, is way more interesting
than just another bigger T. rex. It's more unique.
It's a completely different kind of predator.
It's an evolutionary experiment that pushed the
boundaries of what a dinosaur could be. It was
trying to become a whale or a crocodile millions
of years before them. And that brings us to the
outro, the unfinished puzzle. Because even after
this entire deep dive, we still don't really
know for sure what it looked like or how it lived.
We don't. The neotype is great, but it's still
fragmentary. The tail was a huge leap forward,
but the biomechanics are still fiercely argued.
It's a constantly shifting picture. And there's
still that whisper of the chimera, isn't there?
That ghost in the machine? It's the ghost that
haunts the data. Is it possible that we are mixing...
Spinosaurus bones with Sigilmasasaurus bones.
Is it possible that the short legs belong to
one species and the giant spine belongs to another
very similar species? We might be building a
dragon out of spare parts from two different
closets. It's probably unlikely, given how the
specimens were associated in the ground. But
until we find a complete, fully articulated skeleton
head to tail, all in one piece, there will always
be a sliver of a doubt. That's the fragility
of it, isn't it? We build these entire worlds,
these entire documentaries and movies based on
fragments and educated guesses. We do. But that's
the beauty and the frustration of paleontology.
We are trying to reconstruct a puzzle where half
the pieces are missing and the box top was burned
in a fire in 1944. I want to leave the listener
with one final provocative thought you mentioned
in the pre -show because it really blew my mind.
The soft tissue. Ah, yes. The parts that don't
fossilize. We focus so much on the bones, but
bones are just the scaffold. Right. Think about
an elephant. If you only had an elephant skull,
you would never guess it had a long, flexible
trunk. You'd just see a weird big hole in the
middle of its face and wonder what it was for.
So what are we missing on Spinosaurus? What's
the trunk? The sail. We assume it was just skin
on bone because that's what we see in lizards.
But what if it was thick? What if it was a muscle
attachment for a massive, powerful neck? Or,
here's a wild one, what if the sail was a framework
for a complex sensory array, like an antenna?
Like a biological radar dish to sense vibrations
in the water. Or what if it was brightly colored
for display in ways we can't even imagine? What
if this snout had soft tissue structures, like
a fleshy wattle or a crest, that rotted away
100 million years ago? We might be looking at
the skeleton of a peacock and drawing a turkey.
We almost certainly are. The real Spinosaurus
was probably stranger, more colorful, and more
complex than anything we've managed to draw so
far. We've only seen the ghost. Well, on that
note, I think I'm going to go stare at a picture
of a heron and try to imagine it with a six -foot
sail. That's a good place to start. thanks for
diving deep with us always a pleasure