The Spinosaurus has been recast twice by Hollywood — first as a land predator defeating a T. rex, then as a fully aquatic diver. According to the announcement of new research, both depictions may be wrong.
A team led by Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, discovered new Spinosaurus fossils deep in the central Sahara of Niger, in an area called Jenguebi. No paleontologist is believed to have worked the site before.
“When you want to find something really, truly new, you have to go where few have been or maybe nobody has been,” Sereno says.
The expedition was not small. The team numbered nearly 100 people — paleontologists, filmmakers, Tuareg guides, and 64 armed guards — and required more than a day and a half of desert driving to reach the site.
An Inland Discovery That Changes the Story
Previous Spinosaurus remains had all been pulled from coastal deposits near ancient seas, which supported the aquatic diver theory. Jenguebi was different. During the Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, it was an inland river basin situated between 500 and 1,000 kilometers from the nearest marine shoreline.
The team unearthed multiple specimens of a new species, named S. mirabilis. The skeletons were buried alongside titanosaurian and rebbachisaurid sauropods — long-necked dinosaurs consistent with a shared inland freshwater environment.
That geographic context directly undermines the diving hypothesis. Every known large-bodied secondarily aquatic tetrapod — whales, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs — is marine. A giant predator thriving in a river system points instead to a wading, shoreline ambush hunter, more like a giant heron than a prehistoric seal.
Built to Float, Not Dive
The anatomy supports the same conclusion. Sereno notes that when lung volume and the permanent air inside its bones are calculated together, the animal would have been buoyant even after exhaling completely.
“Birds that dive get rid of those air sacks — penguins got rid of them,” he says. “It’s a balloon you can’t fight against.”
Its limbs also present a problem for the diving model — they were too long to function effectively as paddles.
The researchers argue this wading lifestyle was not exclusive to S. mirabilis. The new species shares fundamental skeletal features with S. aegyptiacus, the species that formed the basis for the Jurassic World Rebirth portrayal. Sereno considers it highly unlikely that one was a river-wading ambush predator while the other was a deep-diving pursuit hunter with limited land mobility.
The name mirabilis translates from Latin as “astonishing” — though the source material cuts off before explaining what physical feature earned the species that name.
Photo by Pixabay
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