Instant Genius - The real story behind Jurassic Park’s most controversial dinosaur

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Chances are that when most of us think of spinosaurs our minds will turn to the hulking, predatory sail-backed dinosaur that famously took down a T. Rex in the Jurassic Park movies. But thanks to their highly fragmented fossil records, in the real world, our knowledge of these fascinating, ancient creatures is far from complete. Where did they live? How did they live? And what did they really look like? In today’s episode, we’re joined by David Hone, a palaeontologist based at Queen Mary University of London, and Mark P. Witton, a palaeontologist and paleoartist based at the University of Portsmouth, to talk about their latest book, Spinosaur Tales, The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs. They tell us how palaeontologists piece together details of dinosaurs’ appearances and behaviours by painstakingly poring over fossil records, why we shouldn’t believe everything we see in the movies, and why there’s still so much to learn about these mysterious, and at times controversial, beasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you're here, world-leading scientists and experts, talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, BBC Science Focus. Chances are that when most of us think as spinosaurs, our minds will turn to the hulking, predatory, sailed-back dinosaur that famously took down a T-Rex in the Jurassic Park movies. But thanks to their highly fragmented fossil records,

in the real world, our knowledge of these fascinating ancient creatures is far from complete. Where did they live? How did they live? And what did they really look like? In today's episode, we're joined by David Hone, a paleontologist based at Queen Mary University of London, and Mark P. Whitten, a paleontologist and paleo artist based at the University of Portsman,

to talk about their latest book, Spinosaur Tales, the biology and ecology of the spinosaurs. They tell us how paleontologists piece together details of dinosaurs' appearances and behaviours by painstakingly pouring over fossil records. Why we shouldn't believe everything we see in the movies, and why there's still so much to learn about these mysterious and at times controversial beasts.

So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us on. So today we're talking about your new book, Spinosaur Tales. So obviously, as the title says, it's all about spinosaurs. So I don't think that they're currently that well known to the general public. You know, they're kind of like a cool friend who likes all the obscure bands' favourite dinosaur. That's the sort of thing I think of them.

So there's still quite a lot that we don't know about them. But let's start with some basics. So of course anyone listening who buys the book knows it's full of lovely illustrations done by Mark. But first off, you know, what do we know about how they looked? Let's start with that. I mean, you're absolutely right that spinosaurs are, lots of people will know Spinosaurus. That's the big one everyone knows because it's been in a couple of Jurassic Park films. And that's always the entry point nowadays for what do people know about dinosaurs.

It has it been in Jurassic Park. So these are the big predatory dinosaurs that people will know, the sail on their back. The thing with this animal is it has changed its appearance a lot. We've known about it for about a century, but since we first discovered it in about 1915, we've just slowly accumulated more and more of it. So we've always known about that sail on its back. But in recent years, we've found more of the skeleton, which suggests it also has a sort of sail down its tail from other spinosaurids. So not so much spinosaurus itself, but from other spinosaurids. We've now got a good idea about the appearance of their face. And they've got

these long, low snouts. They're somewhat crocodile-like. The crocodile analogy is a little bit crude, but it's somewhat crocodile-like. Very long necks, very long arms, with big, robust claws at the end. So they're quite distinctive-looking dinosaurs. Although they're part of the predatory dinosaur group, they're very different looking from like your classics, like Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus. They were pretty big animals. So I don't know if you grew up, probably a similar age to me, you grew up with top trumps. Oh, yeah. So how big are they compared to other dinosaurs?

You know, what can we put them in the ballpark of? So they really are very, very large, even by the standards of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs. So within the spinosaurs, you've got two, you've got a basic division into two groups. So the Spinosaur Rhines, which are the ones Mark's been talking about so far, which are the more derived, bigger sailback ones. And those are extraordinarily large. So Spinosaur Rus, there's an estimate floating around of up to 15 metres in length, and that would make it the longest single-known carnivorous dinosaur that we've recovered.

That's slightly problematic as these things always are, because that's based off an extremely large nose that we have, which we're then scaling up from a very incomplete skeleton. But it is not unreasonable. But things like Tyrannosaurus in particular are much more robustly built. So Spinosaurus may have been absolutely longer, but as like a fundamentally bigger, heavier animal, Tyrannosaurus and some of its relatives would have been bigger animals. And then the other group of the Spinosaurus is the Barionicines, named after Barionics from the UK. And they're rather smaller, but again, we're looking at like 8 to 10 metres or so, total length.

And okay, that includes quite a lot of tail in both of these cases. but that is still very much in the kind of upper 10% or so of large size for these big things. So spinosaurs were fundamentally big and spinosaurus was massive. Yeah, so we'll get into some of the finer details in a bit. But first of, I think this can be really confusing for the sort of casual dinosaur fan, the different periods like Cretaceous, Jurassic. So when were spinosaurs around? So happily, if you're a spinosaur fan,

At the minute, you just really have to focus on the Cretaceous because we don't have, we certainly don't think we have any confirmed Jurassic examples of Spinosaurs. So we expect them to appear in the Jurassic. So the Jurassic is sort of very roughly about 200 to 150 million years ago. That's when we're expecting spinosaurs to appear, but their fossil record is not particularly good at that end of all, so we don't have any of the very first ones. But once we get to the Cretaceous, that's when their fossil record begins.

and they're around for most of the Cretaceous, but they don't make it all the way to the end. So this is not a group of dinosaurs that goes extinct with the big asteroid impact that wipes out, you know, the rest of the non-bird dinosaur groups. They die out a little bit earlier. It's not entirely clear why they did die out, but there's a big turnover in not only dinosaurs at this point.

It's an end of a period that we call the Cennemanian. At the end of the Cennemanian, there's lots of turnover in all sorts of animal groups. And so whatever is causing that probably also did it in for Spinosaurs as well. Yeah, so another sort of basic question is, whereabouts have we found them? You know, where do we think they lived or roamed or however you'd say it? Well, their distributions simultaneously really quite broad and also strangely limited. Contradictory, though, that sounds.

So we have a load of them in South America. We have a load of them in Europe, in particular in the UK, but also France, Spain, Portugal. we've got a load from East Asia, so Laos, Thailand, that kind of region. We've got a load from north and getting into Central Africa, so right the way from Morocco to Egypt across North Africa and down into Niger. But then we don't have them in like North America

where you'd really expected them to have got to. If you're in Europe, East Asia and South America, you really should have got into North America and yet they don't appear to have done so. There's a handful of bits like literally one claw in North America, one claw in India and a couple of bones in Australia, which have all been referred to spinosaurs. They're, let's say, unconvincing, but at least plausible that they are.

But in general, they seem to have this, yeah. The classic split from like northern and southern continents or western and eastern isn't really affect them. So they're simultaneously as I say very widespread, but then really don't get into places where you'd expect them to be quite common. Yeah, so you mentioned there the different parts of fossils. This is, to me, really fascinating. But do we have any sort of like Rosetta Stone finds where you're going to say,

ah, that's definitely a spinosaur. That's our prime example. Kinder. They are, as Mark was alluding to earlier, they are extremely fragmentary, actually, compared to even most other dinosaur groups, many of which aren't as well known as I think people might imagine. And for spinosaurs, there simply isn't any single, even vaguely complete skeleton. So probably the best thing we've got is,

a thing called sucomimus, which is another barionicine, but a really big one from Niger. And although we don't have one good skeleton for that, we've got four, if not five, decent thirds of a skeleton, but they cover various different bits. And so that's enough overlap to be confident they're all the same animal. And then we can put enough of that back together to go, okay, we've got a pretty good idea of what a single whole one would look like. But yeah, for a group where we have any really quite a low, number of species, many of which have been named literally in the last four or five years.

We were constantly updating the species list while we wrote the book because more and more stuff was coming out. But it's all noses and bits of tails and partial brain cases and a few vertebrae here and there. It's a surprisingly light mixed bag, in my opinion. The Spinosaur fossil record is far more typical of a dinosaur group. So when we talk about our favorite dinosaurs, things like the horned dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurs, etc. Their fossil records are exceptionally good. And they kind of give a slightly distorted idea of this is what we know about ancient life. With spinosaurs, where we have got these far more fragmentary skeletons, it's like that, this is a far more typical way of dealing with fossil animals where you don't have complete

pictures. And you have the odd one or two that are known from better remains. But there are plenty of ancient animals, ancient plants, where we just don't have a very good idea. idea of exactly what they look like or, you know, a complete picture of their anatomy. And there's the, I think, one nice thing about working with spinosaurs or talking about spinosaurs is that you're able to convey that to people, that it isn't all these really fantastic sort of like trophy specimens a lot of the time you are dealing with, as Dave said, you know, bits of snout and bits of tail. And yeah, it gives you an idea of actually how much more complicated paleontology really is when you don't have complete specimens. Yeah, exactly. So personally speaking, my, my, my background's

in quantum physics. Whenever I say that to someone, they think, wowzers, you know, that goes straight over my head. That's really difficult to understand. But of course, quantum processes are happening all around us all of the time. Not the same with paleontology. So one of the things that sort of blows my mind is how you piece together all of these different fossils and to make a picture of the physical form, the morphology of the dinosaur. So how do you go about that? Sometimes it's relatively straightforward. If you've got a complete skeleton of an animal, you can start to map out where muscles attach. One nice thing about land vertebrates, so what we call the tetrapods, the limbed vertebrates, we've got a pretty conservative muscle system. So the muscles

that make our bodies move are pretty much the same as those that made a dinosaur move. So if you're a good anatomist and you can recognize, okay, that's where the muscles of the thigh would attach. That's where the muscles of the fallen would attach. And you can get all that information from a skeleton. And then after that, you know, if we have details of fossil skin, which we have a reasonable record of, it's not as complete as we'd like, but we have bits and pieces of it. You can put that over the top of the muscles and you can start getting into quite a lot of detail with this, looking at aspects of things like the skull. You can look at exactly where the nostrils would sit in the skull. It's not necessarily in the big open bit at the front of the

skull. There's other little depressions and little nooks and crannies that you might look for for things like nostril placement, ear placement. So there's a lot of, lot of detail you can put into this. But more fundamentally, if you don't have a complete skeleton, you have to try and assemble a skeletal reconstruction using the best specimen you have of the species that you're trying to reconstruct, and then you bring in other anatomy from close relatives to try and fill in the gaps. The problem you have, of course, is that the bigger the gaps are, the more you're having to extrapolate, the more you're having to, I don't want to say guess, but you're building further and further out over into the unknown.

This is something that really applies for Spinosaurus. So the headline animal, you know, the one that everyone wants to talk about, it's not a dinosaur that we know inside and out. And so every time you see a picture of one, whether it's a picture that I've drawn or someone else has drawn, have to understand that's basically a hypothesis, that's saying this is what we think it looks like today with more information that could change.

And because it is quite a poorly known animal, it could change quite a lot. So there's still lots to say about what Spinosaurus and Spinosaurus look like. That must be a big part of why people that study it like you guys find it so exciting. I have heard people literally say it's like detective work and that you're almost Sherlock Holmesian taking these vague strands of ideas and then tying them together and then trying to build up a picture. And I definitely think that's a bit of an exaggeration. but it does mean it's a truly fascinating occupation

when you're trying to work out something like this and then personally I'm particularly interested and work a lot on behaviour and ecology. So you're then taking this very fragmentary skeleton or fragmentary set of data with all the problems that come with having an incomplete data set and then trying to take it further. And the challenge there is kind of not to build a flight of fancy

around a couple of different traits, but actually do something holistic and grounded that's based on real data and produces testable hypotheses that you can then assess with other lines of data or comparison to living systems or pull something else out of the fossil record like isotope data or anything like this and try and interpret it. So yeah, it does make for an interesting choice. And as Mark says, Spidersaurus are perhaps a little more challenging than many others. Wishing you could be there live for the big game.

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deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Let's stick with the kind of headline shape or morphology of. them. They have these sort of huge sail-like structures running across their backs. So what is that? And do we know what purpose it served? So first of all to say, actually, so we talked about the barionicines, the barionicines don't really have that. They have a kind of little ridge, but they certainly don't have this enormous sailback that Spinosaurus is famous for. And even

some of the other Spinosaurines, there's a thing called Icteovenator from, I can never remember this Laos or Thailand, but from the Far East Asia. And that's got very different, very long, but kind of fan-shaped, blocky parts to the overall sale. So it's quite a different shape and structure. And that alone starts telling you maybe what's going on here because signaling structures, so think of things like all the elaborate stuff you get on pheasants or all the different horn shapes and things you get on both horn dinosaurs and modern antelope and stuff like this. When it's something that is about display and communication, there's very often very heavy variation. because it's about looking big or looking different rather than necessarily a strict mechanical function

when you'd then expect convergence. You know, there's a reason birds all have pretty similar wing shapes because flight is really constraining and therefore you only have a few different wings that can realistically fly. If every single animal has some kind of different shape on its head or on its back or whatever, that kind of points to that. And in the case of the Spinosaurus, they also have little signaling crests and bumps and horns on their head. And as Mark said, at least some of them have some kind of. kind of big light fan on the tail as well.

And so put that together and it starts to look like quite a collective display package. It's often been suggested that maybe this is thermoregulator, you know, it's a big thing to soak up the heat or shed it. And that's certainly plausible, but it's probably not what drove the evolution of this, because there are certainly much bigger, heavier animals in the same ecosystem as Spinosaurus that don't have anything like it, for example. So if it really was critical, you'd expect all of them to have it too, and they don't. So it probably could have been a side benefit of having this, but that's probably not what's caused its evolution in the first place. So let's have look at what we know about their lifestyles.

What kind of environments or habitats do we think they lived in? So there's a lot of skew in the spinosaur fossil record towards sort of low wetland kind of environment. So these are animals which we think are, spending most of their time fishing. And so, you know, it stands to reason we don't find them in deserts. We don't get many fossil deposits in sort of upland mountainous areas, but even where we do, we don't find them there either. These are animals that seem to like big, swollen rivers, lakes, the sort of places where they're going to be able to go and get the food that they want, which for spinosaurs, the entire group, regardless of what they look like, they all seem to have

the adaptations necessary for acquiring fish. coming off the back of that. So were they sort of amphibious? I know that's a controversial question. Well, so it is. And so we'll cut to the chase and say, there's a lot more detail in the book because we spend a lot of time talking about this.

But in a sense of, were they hanging around a lot in and near water? Yeah, were they swimming a lot like a crocodile, like an otter, or even punting underwater like a hippo? No, we really don't think so. And it's not just us. There's really quite a lot of scientific papers that have been published,

challenging that big idea, which is what you do see in the movies and various documentaries of kind of push this idea. I was going to say, we think, I think that's very weak. I think Mark quite possibly thinks it's weaker even than I do. Because, of course, hanging in water and being a swimmer are not the same thing. Flamingos, storks, herons. There's lots of things that spend an awful lot of time in and around water.

and you think of all the little wading birds like, you know, plovers and avocets and stuff around coasts, but are they bobbing about in the water like a duck, let alone swimming like a cormor? No, they're absolutely not. So these two things are not, you know, mutually inclusive. You can be absolutely a fish feeding water specialist without being some kind of good swimmer. Yeah, so you mentioned a few different sort of animals that are currently alive. And you mentioned, like, the comparison work I can do when we're looking at, and we're looking at, you know, currently living animals.

Are there any animals that even vaguely compare to spinosaurs that are alive now? So, I mean, in our preferred hypothesis, and it's not just myself and Dave, there are lots of people who would share this opinion. I think we're mainly looking at things like herons. That seems to be that when we talk about the different models of spinosaur lifestyle, we sometimes just colloquially talk about the heron model, which is where these animals are wading out into the water and grabbing things with their jaws.

But unlike a heron, obviously, they also have strongly clawed forelims. And so what we suspect is happening. The skulls of spinosaurs are actually quite weak in terms of their mechanical strength and also in their bite force. But they're able to snap their jaws pretty rapidly. So the jaws, and they've also got very long, flexible necks. So they have a great ability to strike and grab a prey, and then they can bring their arms in as required to help,

if it's a particularly big thing that they've grabbed. They've then got their arms that they can bring in to hold and destabilise it and maybe haul out of the water if necessary. So it's somewhere between a heron and a bear maybe. I don't know if there's exactly a precise modern analog for what we think spinosaurs were doing. But yeah, it's something around that sort of model. Yeah, I've talked a lot about the kind of heron model. And then people go, oh, well, it's just standing in water.

It's like, well, if you look at things like Maribu Storks, they turn up well inland, they're big scavengers, even things like the grey heron's, we get in the UK and have a very wide distribution. They eat rabbits and rats and snakes and all kinds of stuff. Fish is the majority of the diet, but it's not the only thing that they're eating. And as Mark says, they've got these, not just these big clawed hands and arms,

but actually extremely strange humeri, the upper arm bones. And I've written in one paper with a colleague Tom Holtz about these actually have something in common with some digging animals, and that might sound very strange with the action of the forelimbs. but if you think about big river banks, you have animals like big turtles, and actually even plenty of crocodiles, will burrow into the banks of rivers. So this, you know, potentially very large animal with the ability to rip open bits of soil or open up nests or find a burrowing

animal. You know, a three-meter crocodile is a big threat to you and I, but it's potentially quite a good meal for an animal that's 15 metres long and might weigh five tons. Like, suddenly that's reasonable. So yeah, they're probably, as Mark said, the majority of what they're doing is standing around in water, but it's not the only thing they're doing by any stretch of the imagination.

And they've probably actually got quite a right range of behaviours and ways of acquiring food. So the sort of current thinking is that they're eating sort of smaller prey, not like what you might see in some Hollywood movies where they're fighting things taking on things that are about the same size of them, you know, is that just off the chart?

I mean, I think that's generally true of carnivorous dinosaurs anyway. I wrote a big paper on this back on 2010, basically arguing that this, particularly you see it again, as you say, like in movies, but also in documentaries and even in the scientific literature, there was a tendency to kind of talk about prey species without talking about individuals within that species. So, yes, was Tyrannosaurus eating triceratops? Absolutely. Was a torsuitary? Tyrannosaurus normally challenging a five-ton triceratops with a meter and a half long horns on its head? No, probably not. It's eating the babies.

They're much more common. They're much smaller. They're much more vulnerable. They don't have the horns. They don't have the experience and knowledge of how to avoid these predators or where to forage or when it's safe to do so or anything like this. And so, yeah, in general, carnivorous dinosaurs were taking things much smaller than themselves. But as Mark says, spinosaurs generally have pretty. weak jaws even compared to comparally sized other carnivores.

So you wouldn't expect them to be taking really big stuff unless, of course, that's already weak or sick, or you've taken it by real surprise or something like that. So in recent times, well, I'd say recent times, probably the last decade or so, the research on sort of dinosaur hides and feathers and colors has been really popular. and is it sort of, you know, rewritten the way that we think how dinosaurs looked. So do we know anything about how spinosaurs looked? Spinosaurus belonged to a part of the predatory dinosaur tree where the signal for feathers starts to get a little bit murky. And so there's, there are dinosaurs that belong to some branches quite close to spinosaurs that were definitely feathered.

Can we then start to pull those feathers back down towards spinosaurs? And the data isn't, doesn't tell us that the feathers were the, there yet, but the record of dinosaur's skin is also, it's not so complete that you can rule it out. But certainly, I mean, these are very big animals. They're living in some very hot places. And in fact, some of the last dinosaurs lived during a particularly warm period in the planet's development. So this is one of the warmest times in the last few hundred million years. Feathers are really good insulators. And if you're already a gigantic animal, you're probably not going to be covered with a thick coat of feathers. So if they did have them, you know, they'd probably

be fairly sparse. We do, I mean, probably looking at where spinosaurs are in the predatory dinosaur tree, we're probably expecting scales. We've got lots of scales from that part of predatory dinosaur revolution. So that's got to be, I think, the null hypothesis. Yeah, it doesn't mean to say that that may not change in years to come. And of course, the other thing we have to be mindful of is that these animals may not have looked the same throughout their entire lives and that maybe as hatchlings, you know, you could well have had little fluffy spinosaurs to keep themselves warm as they got bigger and you start to become as you become a sort of a multi-ton animal shedding heat becomes more of a problem than keeping warm and so at that point maybe you start

to ditch your feathers and just have a body that can radiate heat as much as it can. Before we start summing up, I'd like to ask one question, T-Mark, because the book's full of lovely illustrations if the different parts of the dinosaurs are different anatomy or whatever. But I think, you know, a lot of people listening, I think, well, what a great job, you know, what does that involve and how do you get into it? I mean, it's a really difficult question to answer concisely. So what I do for a living in addition to writing books is I'm paleo artist, so it is a specialist form of a natural history illustration. We've already covered some of this. You know, this is where you are building up skeletons and, you know, putting muscles and skin over the top of it.

And yeah, so that's why I spend my time. doing and I provide artwork for not only books but also for museums and for you know I do concept art for documentaries and things it's a it's a really fun way to make a living it's also very specialist and not something that it's not a huge thriving industry you know there's only a handful of us who do this full time around the world but yeah it's a really fun thing to do and I would say that if people do want to get into it the best thing to do is just start drawing and get your get your artwork out on the internet. There's a really good online paleo art community and there's lots of people to give you advice and feedback and things. I mean, that's how most of us get into it nowadays

is just by getting your art out there and then people see it and they'll contact you and say, hey, can you do a picture for me? Great. Yeah, thanks for sharing that with us. So sort of one summing up question, there's still a lot we need to know about these dinosaurs. Do you have a sort of top of the pops list of things that you'd like to find out, like, you know, in the next next, let's say, five years? Because we know so little about them, the shopping list of things we'd like is really long. I'd settle for a decent spinosaurus skeleton, because it's so controversial. This is the animal that new papers will get published, and there'll be lots and lots of hype around it, and there's almost sort of a tribal aspect among, you know, spinosaurus fans as to how they

want to interpret it. And I think it would be really nice to finally get to grips with that animal in particular to really start to put some of these discussions to bed and to be able to say, okay, was it an animal that was swimming all the time? Was it a giant heron? You know, how long were its legs? There's all these questions that we have around it. There's also a historic component to this because the original spinosaurus material we found in the early 20th century, that was all destroyed in World War II. So there is an extent of trying to claw back that information that we've already lost. But yeah, I think getting a good spinosaurus space, would be great for lots of reasons.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Fakers. That was David Holm and Mark P. Whitten. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out their book, Spinosaur Tales, The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

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