So You Think You Know About Spinosaurus? by Ben Garrod

Author:Ben Garrod [Garrod, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786697936
Publisher: Head of Zeus

1. How often do you think about your nostrils? How often are you grateful for them? Well, Spinosaurus had excellent nostrils. They weren’t at the end of the snout (like a crocodile) but they were high up, near the nose. This means Spinosaurus could have held the end of its snout underwater, with its mouth open, in order to catch fish. Because they were high up on the face, the nostrils would have acted like a snorkel, so the dinosaur could hunt and breathe at the same time.

2. We call the big thing on the back of a Spinosaurus a sail but it may not have been. The idea is that this row of long spines on the vertebrae was connected by skin, making a very big (and awesome-looking) sail. But because palaeontologists haven’t found any Spinosaurus skin imprint fossils yet, we can’t be 100 per cent certain.

3. It’s time to talk about the sail … it’s one of the most well-known things from any of the dinosaurs but what was it for? Remember that evolution does everything for a reason – the giraffe’s long neck, the chameleon’s funny eyes and the eagle’s hooked talons all have a purpose. The Spinosaurus sail would have been the same and helped the predator in some way. There are several possible ideas:

Thermoregulation (thur-mo reg-u-lay-shun)

This means that the sail may have been involved in controlling the body temperature. We don’t know how dinosaurs controlled their temperature. Were they warm-blooded, or endothermic (en-doh thur-mik) and made their own heat, like mammals and birds do? Were they cold-blooded, or ectothermic (ek-tow thur-mik) like reptiles and amphibians or were they somewhere between the two, like some fish such as tuna and mako sharks? Maybe Spinosaurus needed to warm its huge body, especially if it spent a lot of time in the water. If the sail had lots of small blood vessels under the skin, then maybe they could have helped warm the large dinosaur – a very early form of sunbathing. Or the sail may have been used for cooling down – using the network of blood vessels in the opposite way. Elephants use their ears like this, helping them cool down when the sun is hottest. Maybe the sail was used to cool Spinosaurus in the hot Cretaceous environment in North Africa.

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