for reasons that we still do not know
dinosaurs unlike many other groups played with the water
but never really adapted themselves for life in the water as predators of fish
for example
until Spinosaurus.
We're here in the fossil lab at the University of Chicago where we have the
bones of Spinosaurus
and it's named after its long spines
dorsal spines that for the big sale
over the back. These spines, here's a piece of one of them,
stretch up for as much as 7 feet making it the tallest structure any dinosaur in
the world
over its back. We took a section
of the femur to look at the details of how old the dinosaur was with the
structure was
and we found that it didn't have a marrow cavity.
Now we had never seen this in any predatory dinosaur
they all have good marrow cavities, but not Spinosaurus and that resembles
animals
that actually are spending a lot of time in water. They want themselves to be a
little bit heavier
so they don't float all the time and they can control their swimming movements.
This thigh bone
is shorter than the shinbone
by several inches. The shinbone is long in animals that paddle.
In animals that are sitting on the top of the water
and using their limbs to paddle, that thigh bone becomes short and stocky
and we noticed the the attachment on the five on for the muscle that moves it
back
is huge. So, what we're looking at is an animal
that has adapted its its hind limb largely for
paddling in water. So that was one of the first things we realized about this dinosaur
was not
a typical land dinosaur with really strong and long limbs for walking.
In fact, by the time we took this thigh bone and attached all the bones together
and made a digital model it couldn't stand on two feet.
It really needed its four limbs to prop itself. It does
top T-rex as the longest predator,
T-rex just over forty feet, Spinosaurus
fifty feet long. You know the Spinosaurus story is
is truly unique. It's an international story of scientists getting together
and that it stretches across a century. The first bones were found by a German
scientist
Ernst Stromer in Egypt in the Western Desert
those bones which he beautifully described, they were destroyed
in WWII and we've been living with more less a shadow this dinosaur
all my life as a scientist. A century would pass
before on a desolate cliffside in Morocco
a nomad would uncovered the bones
of the feet of this dinosaur sticking out and he would
dig those up, and those bones will be taken back to an oasis nearby
where I have worked and other people have worked in the Sahara
we've worked along this cliff line that was one that escaped us.
Those bones will be sold and taken into the fossil market. They would show up
later
in the basement a museum in Milan, where
Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist working here at the University of
Chicago
would recognize them as the very bones he saw
in a shop in Morocco. He would go back to Morocco
find the fossil dealer who had ultimately take us back to the original
site.
Now that is a first for paleontology. We've never relocated
a celebrated fossil that was taken out of the ground years before.
We went back, found more bones of the animal, brought them all
to Chicago to be scanned and incorporated into the first
truly accurate digital model built are all these different specimens.
Putting Stromer's observations and this historical like-- he was right about
almost everything he said about this dinosaur from his specimens
and he is going to be the the historical hero of our story.
But it's something more than that. For Morocco
this specimen is going back home. For Morocco and the future
this is going to jumpstart a museum tradition
in the country. They have a celebrated centerpiece,
Spinosaurus, to build around and that is a very happy ending to a scientific
story.
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