Spinosaurus, a fearsome meat-eating dinosaur with a strange "sail" on its spine, was named in 1915 by
Ernst Stromer, a German paleontologist. Estimated to be around fifty feet long, the Spinosaurus lived during the Cretaceous Period. Experts believe that some of its spiny thorns were as tall as six feet.
Although not much is known about this creature, paleontologists believe it was a menacing killer. Its
Latin name means "thorn lizard" or "spiny lizard. “Not many fossils of this giant theropod have been found. Stromer located his specimen at the Bahariya Formation (near the Bahariya Oasis) in Egypt, but it was destroyed during the 1944 bombing of Munich. Scientists from Pennsylvania launched another expedition to the Bahariya in 1999. They found…show more content… No complete skeleton of this ferocious carnivore has been located to date, however. For many decades, after Stromer's fossils were destroyed, paleontologists were thus unable to conduct extensive research on a Spinosaurus fossil. Then ... another specimen, about 36-feet long, was discovered in eastern Morocco’s Kem fossil beds (pictured below). It had been found by a nomad who walked around with pieces of his findings in a box. A new study about that Kem find—published on
September 11, 2014, in Science Magazine’s online version—includes a statement that Spinosaurus was likely an aquatic Dinosauria Ibrahim, a palaeontologist from the University of Chicago, is the lead researcher on the 2014 study. It was to Ibrahim that the nomad (who didn’t give his name during their first encounter and wants to remain anonymous still) had shown his treasure in 2008. Using scientific terms, Ibrahim and his team summarize their findings in an abstract for Science Magazine: We describe adaptations for a semiaquatic lifestyle in the dinosaur Spinosaurus Egyptiac. These adaptations include retraction of the fleshy nostrils to a position near the mid-region of the skull and an elongate neck
