Paleontologists have recognized the primary unequivocal new species of the fish-eating dinosaur Spinosaurus in additional than a century.
Spinosaurus mirabilis is among the last-surviving spinosaurid species. Picture credit score: Dani Navarro.
Named Spinosaurus mirabilis, the brand new species roamed Earth throughout the Cretaceous interval, round 95 million years in the past.
The dinosaur’s fossils have been uncovered within the distant fossil space of Jengueb in Niger, deep within the central Sahara, by College of Chicago’s Professor Paul Sereno and his colleagues.
Essentially the most placing function of Spinosaurus mirabilis is a large, scimitar-shaped cranial crest, in contrast to something beforehand documented within the group.
“The scimitar-shaped crest of Spinosaurus mirabilis was so massive and sudden that we initially didn’t acknowledge it for what it was once we plucked it and a few jaw fragments from the desert floor in November 2019,” they defined.
“Returning with a bigger workforce in 2022 and discovering two extra crests, we realized the novelty of the brand new species we had unearthed.”
“Primarily based on the crest’s floor texture and inside vascular canals, we consider the crest was sheathed in keratin.”
“This show function was brightly coloured in life, curving towards the sky as a blade-shaped beacon.”
Spinosaurus mirabilis snaring the coelacanth Mawsonia some 95 million years in the past from a river in northern Africa in what’s now the Sahara Desert in Niger. Picture credit score: Dani Navarro.
The invention of Spinosaurus mirabilis challenges long-standing concepts about the place and the way spinosaurid dinosaurs lived.
Till now, most spinosaurid fossils had been present in coastal deposits, prompting hypothesis that these predators could have been absolutely aquatic.
Nonetheless, the brand new fossil locality in Niger is between 500 and 1,000 km from the closest historic marine shoreline.
In line with the authors, Spinosaurus mirabilis probably lived in a forested inland habitat dissected by rivers.
“I envision this dinosaur as a sort of ‘hell heron’ that had no downside wading on its sturdy legs into two meters of water however in all probability spent most of its time stalking shallower traps for the numerous massive fish of the day,” Professor Sereno mentioned.
The invention is reported in a paper revealed at present within the journal Science.
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Paul C. Sereno et al. New scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation. Science, revealed on-line February 19, 2026; doi: 10.1126/science.adx5486
