Researchers agree that Spinosaurus ate fish, but disagree over whether it hunted from the shore, waded in the shallows or swam in pursuit of its prey.Credit...Daniel Navarro
The New York Times has an interesting article about Spinosaurus. Was Spinosaurus a swimming dinosaur? That question is controversial in the world of dinosaur paleontologists. A new paper recently published in the journal Nature extends the discussion. The new research led by Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft and an amateur paleontologist and Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago addresses previous research that found dense bones predicted which animals lived their life in water. Spinosaurus has very dense bones.
In 2022, researchers led by Matteo Fabbri, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, argued in their paper that bone density was a reliable predictor of whether an animal lived in the water or on land for a much broader swath of creatures, including extinct species.
“We thought, Oh, is this just mammals and or is this also reptiles?” Dr. Fabbri said in an interview. “And if this is true, can we infer ecology in extinct animals, including weird-looking dinosaurs like Spinosaurus?”Dr. Fabbri said the analysis showed that “very high bone density is correlated with the probability of going underwater.”
...
Although Dr. Myhrvold and Dr. Sereno are now at odds with Dr. Fabbri and Dr. Ibrahim, they were all once on the same side as co-authors of the 2014 paper that described the Spinosaurus uncovered in Morocco.
“We split intellectually,” Dr. Sereno said.
