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In today's issue
Happy Friday. This is the shorter weekend edition of Extinct Era: one big story, the week's fossil news, and a first look at Tuesday's Deep Cut.
By reader request: how Spinosaurus lost its bones, and how a chance sighting at a café led to new ones
An armored amphibian that may have been the first to live entirely in the sea
Coming Tuesday: why did T. rex have such tiny arms? (Premium)
THE BIG STORY
Spinosaurus lost its bones in a 1944 air raid, and a man walking past a café led to new ones
A cast of the 2014 Spinosaurus reconstruction at the National Geographic Museum. Photo by Ryan Somma (CC BY 2.0)
By reader request: Spinosaurus.
In 1912, the bones of a huge predator were dug out of the desert in Egypt. The German paleontologist Ernst Stromer described the animal (Spinosaurus aegyptiacus), and its bones went on display at a museum in Munich.
During World War II, Stromer tried to get his collection moved out of Munich. The museum's director refused. In April 1944, an Allied air raid destroyed the museum and nearly all of Stromer's fossils.
All that was left were field notes, drawings and old photographs. For about 70 years, one of the biggest predatory dinosaurs ever found was known mostly from paper.
Then, in 2008, a young paleontologist named Nizar Ibrahim was in Erfoud, Morocco, when a local man showed him a box of fossil bones in purplish rock. Ibrahim bought them, even though he thought they were probably of little scientific value.
The next year, he visited the Natural History Museum in Milan, where researchers showed him a partial skeleton of a giant dinosaur. It was clearly a Spinosaurus. Its bones sat in the same purplish rock with yellow streaks as the ones in his box. He suspected they came from the same animal, if only he could find where the rest was buried.
There was one problem. He didn't know the fossil hunter's name. So he went back to Erfoud to look for him. On the last day, having given up, he was sitting in a café when a man walked by, and Ibrahim recognized him at once. The man led him to the spot where he had dug up the bones.
In 2014, Ibrahim and his team described the new Spinosaurus bones from Morocco in the journal Science. Using the new fossils and Stromer's old drawings and photos, they rebuilt a skeleton about 50 feet (15 meters) long and suggested that Spinosaurus spent most of its time in the water.
Not everyone agrees. Other scientists argue it was more like a giant heron, wading in the shallows to catch fish. The debate is still open.
Spinosaurus got a new skeleton. It still doesn't have an answer.
THIS WEEK IN FOSSILS
A plant-eating dinosaur found at a brickworks in Surrey, England, in 2001 is a new species (Paludohadros proudlovii): an iguanodontian about 5 meters (16 feet) long that lived around 125 million years ago, named after a former manager of the works, Will Proudlove. [Natural History Museum]
A heavily armored amphibian from Guizhou, China, about 237 million years old (Gerrothorax maritimus), may be the first known amphibian to have lived without access to land or fresh water. [Nature Ecology & Evolution]
A piece of hip bone from southern Brazil is the first herrerasaurid, one of the earliest groups of predatory dinosaurs, found in Triassic rock layers full of a plant-eater called Exaeretodon, a sign these hunters survived a shift in the animals around them. [The Science of Nature]
COMING TUESDAY IN THE DEEP CUT
T. rex was about 12 meters (39 feet) long, yet its arms were only around 1 meter (about 3 feet) long. For more than a century, scientists have argued about what those tiny arms were for, and on Tuesday the Deep Cut follows the strangest twists in that argument.
Did You Know? The last woolly mammoths on Earth lived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off Siberia. They died out around 4,000 years ago. By then, the Great Pyramid of Giza had already been standing for several centuries.
READER REQUESTS
One of you asked about a prehistoric giant of the sea, and we've already told one of the strangest stories about one.
The "sea serpent" that drew crowds on Broadway in 1845, and the scientist who worked out what it really was [Read it]
Want us to cover your favorite? Tell us here.
Have a great weekend. The next full issue lands Tuesday.
Till next time,