Spinosaurus aegyptiacus: Bipedal or Quadrupedal?

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Spinosaurus aegyptiacus: Bipedal or Quadrupedal?

Spinosaurus was the largest theropod to ever walk on the earth, discovered in 1912 for the first time, it has been nominated to be larger than the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex.

This giant theropod was suggested to be between 12.6–18 metros long (41–59 ft) and 4.25-5 meters tall, even new evidence has came to light to show that it was smaller than this…

Spinosaurus, an important dinosaur of Africa. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This one is the original Spinosaurus skeleton, larger than most of the other adult ones but strangely it’s bones are thinner, his skull was long but fragile, with a bite estimated to be between 1-2 tons ( it’s very difficult to determine a Spinosaurus bite force).

This skeleton has proven that Spinosaurus was bipedal too, even in 2014 something different has been found…

An a passionated paleontologist, named Ibrahim decided to paste all the bones of a new found spinosaurus and this was the final result:

This reconstruction was way different than the original one and from that moment it started to think that Spinosaurus was not bipedal, but quadrupedal , also it has been proven that Spinosaurus was not a dinosaur hunter, but a fish eater which spent most of the time in water as a crocodile.

10 Facts You Don’t Know About Spinosaurus

There is the 2014 reconstruction of spinosaurus:

So with this new evidence, Spinosaurus wasn’t  considered to be the biggest theropod ever (in terms of height and size, it was still the longest).

In 2015-16 all this has been debunked because some paleontologists started think that left legs of spinosaurus were incomplete and to prove that it is real we need to find more skeletons like this, even there are some others quadrupedal exemplars skeletons.

So for once again Spinosaurus is bipedal, but not as the jurassic park 3 one which is very inaccurate.

Jurassic Park 3 Spinosaurus

But still considered to be a fish eater because his jaws were designed to catch fishes and his body was adapted to swim.

So in your opinion… was Spinosaurus bipedal or was it quadrupedal?

Source: www.scified.com