When we think of dinosaurs we tend to think about the T-rex and other land and flight dinosaurs. Some could swim; the Spinosaurus aegypticus was an amazing swimmer. The 95 million year old cretaceous predator was the first swimming and the biggest meat-eater ever discovered. He earned his scientific name by the massive spiny sail on his back and his ability to swim. Scientific names such as Spinosaurus aegypticus describe the animal; this  dinosaur’s name tells us that it had spikes and was aquatic.

The S. aegyptiacus was first discovered about a century ago in the Sahara dessert, when these fossils were destroyed during an air raid in WWII. Nizbar Ibraham from the University of Chicago says, “We had to wait nearly 100 years for a new skeleton, the animal we are resurrecting is so bizarre it is going to force dinosaur experts to rethink many things they thought they knew”.

Paleontologists working on desert cliffs called Kem Kem beds in Morocco discovered a set of fossils that suggest the dinosaur was semi-aquatic. The team reveled that S. aegyptiacus was more than 49 feet long making it larger than a Trex. Aquatic adaptions such as dense bones, flat feet, and its short hind limbs allowed it to be like the earliest whales.

This carnivorous creature could retract its small nostrils to the top of its head to breath when partially submerged. This creature was even large enough to chow down on prehistoric sharks, sawfish, and lungfish in an once-large river system stretching across northern Africa.

When asked to comment about these new dinosaur revelations,  Mrs. Wakefield told us that, “I am a dinosaur.”