Short Wave - Spinosaurus: The Aquatic Dinosaur

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

(Encore episode) We chat with National Geographic Explorer and paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim about his team's discovery of the Spinosaurus, the first known swimming dinosaur. The discovery and subsequent modeling showing the effectiveness of the Spinosaurus's tail underwater were detailed in Nature.And you can check out National Geographic's coverage here.Our team would love to hear your dinosaur-themed episode ideas. Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safaya here, grab your hiking boots and a notepad. Because today, we're going on a paleontology trip to northern Africa, to Morocco. This is where Nizar Ibrahim's journey starts back in 2008, after a man sold him a box of dinosaur fossils that would change his life. You know, when I looked at the fossils, they were in a cardboard. box. I just thought that these fossils could be interesting. It was just a hunch, just like something like a gut feeling. But I could tell that the bones that were in the cardboard box

looked like they came from one in the same place and they probably belonged to one animal. So Nizar left Morocco and didn't really think about the bones again. Until just a year later, while he was at a museum in Italy, some fellow paleontologists invited him to look at some bones in a basement. Normal paleontology stuff. I looked at the bones there, and there were quite a lot of bones. There were leg bones and big spines and some skull bones. And my Italian colleagues and myself suspected that these bones

belonged to spinosaurus, which was really exciting. But then I noticed that these bones looked really, really, really. really similar in terms of, you know, the color, the texture, their shape to the ones I had seen in this cardboard box in Morocco. And that's when I realized that what I had seen in Morocco were the very first bones of this skeleton. And I thought, oh gosh, I have to find the dig site where all of these bones came from. Spinosaurus. It's a dinosaur paleontologists have been fascinated with for over a century. The first spinosaurus fossils were discovered in the early 1900s.

By a pioneering German paleontologist, Ernst Stromer. Only to be lost after a museum in Munich that housed them was bombed in World War II. And that was really the end of the spinosaurus story. People always hoped to find new remains of this dinosaur, but they were not successful. More recently, paleontologists like Nizar suspected it might be an aquatic dinosaur, which would be a first. What? But without a full set of spinosaurus bones, it would be hard to prove.

Which is why Nizar was so adamant about finding this guy. Because if he could find the guy that gave him those bones and the dig sites they came from, he might be able to find other bones to complete that picture. But there was just a tiny little problem. I only met this guy for a few minutes, and I don't know his name I don't have an address

I don't have a phone number and that's what I also told my Moroccan colleague who was understandably very skeptical of my plans and he said well how are we going to find this guy and I said well you know I do remember one thing about this man and I'm 100% sure about this the man we're looking for has a moustache and you have to remember they're

50,000 or more fossil hunters operating in Morocco. It's a huge business. And, of course, this is a big place. We're talking about the Sahara Desert. And so looking for this one man really was like looking for a needle, not in a haystack, but looking for a needle in the Sahara Desert. So today on the show, Nizar's search for a mustachioed man and how his wild adventure helped reshape our understanding of dinosaurs.

Buckle up, y'all. So first, let's talk about what paleontologists think this spiny boy dinosaur looked like. It is one of the weirdest dinosaurs out there, and I think people had a really hard time wrapping the head around the anatomy of spinosaurs, because it's so unique and so bizarre. So Spinosaurus was a giant predatory dinosaur. It was probably even longer than a T-Rex. But more importantly, it looked very different from T-Rex and other more typical predatory dinosaurs. dinosaurs. It had a long, narrow snout, a bit like a crocodile with conical teeth, a huge sail on its back. Some of the spines that formed the sail were taller than a person.

It had relatively short hind limbs and, as we now found out, a really, really strange paddle-like tail. So it was a dinosaur like no other. A dinosaur like no other. Worth Nieser. are fighting for funding from National Geographic, booking a trip to Morocco on the tiny chance that the bones in the cardboard box belonged to a spinosaurus. And the even tinier chance that he would find the fossil dealer five years after he sold them to him. We tried to find the guy and, you know, we travel to several far-flung places in the desert, talking to some of the local fossil hunters and they didn't know anything about our mystery moustache man. And they also didn't know anything about a partial skeleton of a dinosaur that was unheard of.

Nizar was devastated. All the big plans he and his team had down the drain. He sat with his colleague, sipping tea at a cafe, about to give up. And just at that moment, a person walked past our table. And I just caught a glimpse of his face. But I can tell you, the man that walked past our table had a mustache. And I just had this strange moment. where I thought, what, did that just happen? Was that the guy? And I got up and gave chase because he was

walking fast and my Moroccan colleague followed. And we caught up with the man and it was the man we had been looking for. Wild. Those things. If you saw that in a movie, you would go like, yeah, right, that would never happen, you know? So. Right, right. So you convince him to tell you where he found the bones. Yes. Yes. As far as he was concerned, he was, you know, done with that dick site. He told me that, yes, you know, he had given me the very first bones he found at the site. And then later he found many more bones. And he said he sold those to an Italian geologist who eventually, as we found out, donated them to science. And that's how they ended up in this Italian museum. Wow. So the bones that you saw were bones from the same Moroccan man with a mustache that he sold to an Italian geologist who you happened to go into that museum

find a room and that was part of the complete set. So not only were those bones in the museum Spinosaurus bones, they were the same bones that you had in your cardboard box. They belonged to the same individual, the same animal. Oh my gosh. Wild. It was wild and actually yeah you can match them up. But he was a little reluctant because you know this was a significant sight and he wasn't sure about, you know, it's kind of a legal gray area too. But I told them, look, I'm a scientist. I'm not a commercial fossil dealer. I want to see if there's more there to collect.

And I also want to return these fossils to the country of origin so that people in North Africa can marvel at their incredible ancient heritage. And at that point, he kind of just looked into the distance and then he said, okay, I'll show you. And he did. After years of excavating the site, countless setbacks, broken tools, and 15 tons of rock later. When we hit the bone-bearing layer, we suddenly found bone after bone after bone, and ended up uncovering a nearly complete tail, so the tail of this same skeleton.

And it turns out this was the most revealing and most interesting part of the entire skeleton. Right, because it seems like the most outrageous part of this story, is already over. But what you basically found, right, was the first, you know, conclusive proof of a semi-aquatic dinosaur. Yes. Right? A dinosaur that spent considerable time in the water.

And that was pretty controversial, right? Yes, absolutely. I mean, ideas that some dinosaurs may have been aquatic or primarily aquatic were first voiced a very, very long time ago when people were just having hard time wrapping the head around the size of some of these animals. And so the idea that dinosaurs ever invaded the aquatic world was certainly a very controversial one. And when we described the first part of the skeleton, we found some circumstantial clues that suggested that this animal actually spent a lot of time in the water.

Clues like what we talked about earlier. Crocodile like conical teeth, short little legs with feet that might be webbed. But it wasn't until they had. the full tail that they really had proof. Like something you'd see at the end of a newt, for example. And this thing was propelling these animals with the water. So we found the propulsive structure for Spinosaurus. There was basically the nail in the coffin.

After they had the structure of the tail, they teamed up with some folks at Harvard that specialized in aquatic locomotion to model how the tail would have worked in water. So we have some actual quantitative data that shows that the tail of Spinosaurus really outperforms all other dinosaur tails and is really comparable to the tails we see in fully aquatic or largely aquatic animals alive today. So there are lots and lots of lines of evidence and they all point in the same direction. So has it, I mean, like, has it really hit you that your team, after all of this, found your dinosaur?

And not only did you find your dinosaur that you discovered evidence of an aquauntary? dinosaur, which is, you know, I don't know, kind of making us rewrite our knowledge of dinosaurs a little bit? Is that too much to say? No, I mean, it's absolutely wild. And this is the kind of discovery you always hope to make one day. You know, I wanted to be a paleontologist since I was about five years old. And you always hope to make a discovery that is really going to rewrite the text box to a certain extent. And that's a really exciting thing about that. story for me. You know, there's so many exciting things about this discovery. You know, it's the

only spinosaurus skeleton in the world today. It is the most complete skeleton of a predatory dinosaur from the Cretaceous of mainland Africa. But the most exciting thing for me is really that this dinosaur is really changing

the way we look at these animals. You know, and many other discoveries just add to an existing narrative, right? We're kind of fleshing out a story, but we're not drastically rewrite it. The aquatic dinosaur story is different in the sense that it really does completely change the way we look at these animals because we're kind of reversing a decade-old dogma, which basically states that dinosaurs just don't do water. Yeah. Well, they do now. They do now. They certainly do.

And that, of course, opens up a whole window of opportunities, and it might actually make us look at other dinosaur skeletons again and, you know, maybe we missed some other examples of aquatic dinosaurs. Awesome, awesome. So Nizar, I noticed you said you were really adamant that these bones stay in Morocco. Why is that? The history of life on Earth, the narrative we have at the moment, is very biased. It's largely based on research and discoveries and museum collections from places like North America and Europe and to a certain extent China now. But Africa, our planet's second largest landmass, is lagging behind and it's severely underrepresented. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to involve African students and researchers and established collections there.

We're trying to tell the story of Africa's age of dinosaurs. So as exciting as all the discoveries are, there's also this bigger picture of capacity building in the developing world. And that's really the reason why I think it's really important that the fossils find a home in the country of origin. Well, I'll tell you what, this is a lot of fun, Nizzer. I really appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Sure. You're very welcome. And congratulations. Thank you. Nisar Ibrahim is a National Geographic explorer and paleontologist.

This discovery was supported by a grant from National Geographic. If you want to read even more about this, you can check out the NatGeo article in the episode notes. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le, and fact-checked by Emily Vaugh. I'm Maddie Safaya. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.