Missed One of the Year's Biggest Dino Stories

I can't believe that, for a week, I missed one of the biggest paleontological stories of the year... actually one of the biggest paleontological stories in the history of the field. It was revealed a week ago that the largely complete fossil remains of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus were discovered in Morocco. Spinosaurus has long represented an enigma... the remains of the "type specimen" were destroyed by an Allied bombing raid on Munich during WW2. Comparisons to other Spinosauridae such as Baryonyx (which has been determined to be a fish-eater due to the presence of scales found among the remains of a specimen), suggested a piscivorous lifestyle. The largely complete fossil Spinosaurus found recently exhibits a plethora of aquatic features:





I'd liken Spinosaurus to a therapod dinosaur playing at being a crocodilian, which amuses me because the crocodilians are the only surviving archosaur group besides the dinosaur-descended birds. In addition, this staggeringly large (estimates range up to almost sixty feet in length) crocodile-mimicking dinosaur shared its habitat with Sarcosuchus, a crocodilian which reached a length of about forty feet. One has to wonder what the hell was in the water in that time and place!