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By Hannah Cease
I really like dinosaurs, always have, always will. My favorite dinosaur though, no contest, is Spinosaurus as it is the longest dinosaur to have been discovered to date, growing up to 52 feet long and weighing up to 22 tons alive during the late cretaceous. How it lived though, has been a topic of recent debate in the dinosaur world. When it was first discovered it was largely accepted that it was the first truly semi-aquatic species of dinosaur. From looking at fossils it was apparent that this dinosaur had aquatic adaptations such as giant slanted interlocking teeth and jaw, and dense bones that may have helped with buoyancy control. However, the extent of its aquatic lifestyle is still up for debate.
Not much was originally known about these dinosaurs when first being truly analyzed in 2014, however it was proposed that they likely had webbed feet and would swim with its powerful legs. In recent years how spinosaurus hunted its prey has been a topic of debate with two different viewpoints both each led by UChicago paleontologists. In 2020, a group of researchers led by Matteo Fabbri, PhD at the University of Chicago countered the initial idea of how spinosaurus lived with newly discovered tall spined tail bones that supported the idea that spinosaurus used its tail like an eel swims to propel itself through the water. In 2022, many of these same researchers came up with additional evidence to support the idea that spinosaurus dove and would hunt in the water in the fact that Spinosaurus had particularly dense bones to use as ballast for diving like a penguin.
However, Paul Sereno, also a professor at Chicago that has worked with spinosaurus fossils, tested models of spinosaurus and claims that they would have been too dense to dive and that spinosaurus would have been too unstable to even swim. Earlier this month, in March 2024 Paul Sereno published a study about “Diving dinosaurs.” This study analyzed spinosaurus fossil bone density and came to the conclusion that spinosaurus likely just waded in the water when hunting. Fabbri came back with a new analysis shortly after Sereno’s that is not yet fully published and stuck to their original findings that spinosaurus dove and swam. This is a major current debate within the dinosaur world led by these two professors, both at the University of Chicago. Was spinosaurus a diving dinosaur, or did they just wade? Personally, I like to think they were divers, but I guess time will tell as we continue to learn more about spinosaurus and dinosaurs in the late cretaceous.