Hello, everyone! Welcome back! Lately, I'll admit that I haven't been working on the my latest stop-motion series episode, "Planet of the Dinosaurs: The Tropical Poles." But this coming week, I'll be back on it! I still hope to get it complete by the end of this month.
With my one and only update out of the way, here's today's non-fiction article. I hope you learn a lot from it:
When I say “dinosaur”, what comes to mind? Perhaps the horned and frilled Triceratops, or the plated Stegosaurus, or maybe the long-necked sauropods. What about when I say “name me the largest carnivorous dinosaur you can think of”. Most would undoubtedly say, “Tyrannosaurus rex”, and indeed, T. rex is a force to be reckoned with. It's big, bad and has a four-foot long jaw with 13-inch teeth. But there are so many other theropods (a dinosaur of a group whose members are bipedal and range from small and delicately built to very large, most ate meat) that the general public doesn't no about. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the America Museum of Natural History gave T. rex its name, which means “Tyrant Lizard King”, in 1905. Ever since its discovery, it became the most famous dinosaur of all. This 43-foot long menace was thought to be the largest carnivore ever to walk the earth, and it stayed that way until the 1990's. Scientists started finding larger and larger carnivores, but the biggest of all was discovered a fairly long time ago. It's name is – Spinosaurus aegypticus. But this monster went through a lot of “hard times” before it earned the title. Come along for the ride as we learn more about one of the strangest dinosaur you've probably never heard of!
With my one and only update out of the way, here's today's non-fiction article. I hope you learn a lot from it:
When I say “dinosaur”, what comes to mind? Perhaps the horned and frilled Triceratops, or the plated Stegosaurus, or maybe the long-necked sauropods. What about when I say “name me the largest carnivorous dinosaur you can think of”. Most would undoubtedly say, “Tyrannosaurus rex”, and indeed, T. rex is a force to be reckoned with. It's big, bad and has a four-foot long jaw with 13-inch teeth. But there are so many other theropods (a dinosaur of a group whose members are bipedal and range from small and delicately built to very large, most ate meat) that the general public doesn't no about. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the America Museum of Natural History gave T. rex its name, which means “Tyrant Lizard King”, in 1905. Ever since its discovery, it became the most famous dinosaur of all. This 43-foot long menace was thought to be the largest carnivore ever to walk the earth, and it stayed that way until the 1990's. Scientists started finding larger and larger carnivores, but the biggest of all was discovered a fairly long time ago. It's name is – Spinosaurus aegypticus. But this monster went through a lot of “hard times” before it earned the title. Come along for the ride as we learn more about one of the strangest dinosaur you've probably never heard of!
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| Spinosaurus aegypticus, the largest carnivore ever to walk the earth! |
The first fossils of this strange dinosaur were discovered in
Bahariya Formation in western Egypt in 1912 by paleontologist and German
aristocrat Ernst Stromer – seven years after T. rex was named. The fossils of
this dinosaur he found were far from a complete skeleton, but they were enough
to tell him that he'd found and completely new species. The only bones he found
was a long skull, some teeth and some tall
vertebrae, many up to 165 cm long! Stromer believed, as many of today's
scientists, that these supported a large sail that stood six to seven feet
tall!
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| Some vertebrae of Spinosaurus stood over six feet tall! |
In 1915, he named the creature Spinosaurus aegypticus,
which apply means “Spine Lizard from Egypt,” after those spines on its back.
Stromer shipped the bones to a museum in Munich, Germany for a special
exhibition. He also argued that Spinosaurus was much larger than T. rex.
Unfortunately for Stromer, his fossils didn't have long to be around. Why?
Well, I guess you could say human history collided with
prehistory. Something terrible happened to the museum the Spinosaurus
was being held in. During World War II, the Nazi headquarters were right in
front of the museum with our Spino fossils, so on the tragic day of April 24,
1944, the Nazi headquarters were bombed, along with the first Spinosaurus
skeleton ever found. That's not all they blew up either; along with the Spinosaurus
remains were the fossils of another creature Stromer discovered, called Carcharodontosaurus.
All that remain of the original Spinosaurus remains are Stromer's
detailed sketches, descriptions and photographs.
Without a Spinosaurus skeleton, scientists weren't
quite sure about this dinosaur. They couldn't make an accurate depiction of
this beast. For the next 31 years, Spinosaurus' trail would be as cold
as an ice cube in the middle of Antarctica. During this time, Spinosaurus
was depicted as a four-legged, quadrupedal carnosaur with a sail on its back
and four-fingered hands. Carnosaurs such as the relatively famous Allosaurus
are dinosaurs with more roundish skulls. The only way scientists would be able
to get a more complete picture of this dinosaur would be to find a “missing
link”, not like the fictional missing links in evolutionary dogma, but the
missing link that connects us to knowing more about this dinosaur.
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| Stromer's sketch of Spinosaurus' jawbone. |
Finally, in 1983, scientists got a “lucky” break. An amatuer
fossil hunter named William Walker discovered the hand claw of a dinosaur later named Baryonyx.
Now when scientists uncovered the almost complete specimen of this new
dinosaur, they finally realized that they had seen many of the bones in Baryonyx
in another dinosaur: Spinosaurus! And indeed, after fully describing the
bones, it became clear that Spinosaurus and Baryonyx are closely
related. Unlike many of the drawings and pictures of Spinosaurus after
the original specimen was destroyed, Baryonyx had a crocodile-like snout
with conical-shaped teeth. These two animals were not carnosaurs at all. They
are so different that scientists placed them in their own family (or possibly “baramin”
in baraminology): the “spinosaurids”, or “spinosaurs.”
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| The skeleton of Baryonyx bears much resemblance to the skeleton of Spinosaurus |
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| Thanks to Baryonyx, we now can be pretty sure of what Spinosaurus looked like |
As if that weren't enough, more spinosaurids were being
discovered in Europe and northern Africa. And if THAT weren't enough, in 1996,
another Spinosaurus specimen was dug up in the Kem Kem Beds of northern
Morocco, Africa by the paleontologist Paul Sereno and his team. By 2002, The
Civic Natual History Museum in Milan obtained a skull of Spinosaurus and
Cristiano Dal Sasso and his team of colleagues studied the fossils of Spinosaurus
extensively. They found out many things about Spinosaurus that
scientists never knew about before, but perhaps one of the most astounding things they learned about Spinosaurus was that Stromer was right all those years ago about the size of this animal - it was bigger than T. rex. In fact, as 59 feet long, it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever to walk the earth!
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| A size comparison of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs (PHOTO CREDITS) |
I hope you enjoyed learning about the history of Spinosaurus.
But we're far from done learning about this beast, there's much, much more!
Next week, be sure to come back to this site and read my friend Joy's article
and the week after that, we'll learn some more about the largest killer ever to
walk the earth.
So long for now!
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