Original subtitles

It's one of the most mysterious dinosaurs ever discovered

Head like a crocodile,

meter-long jaws,

a spectacular sail,

and an overall body larger than T. rex.

There is no animal alive or extinct

that we know of that looks anything like Spinosaurus

Spinosaurus

Only one skeleton has ever been found

And in a single night,

it was destroyed

It was a catastrophic loss

to science overall

Now, after a century of searching,

a new skeleton has emerged from the Sahara

When this skeleton is revealed,

it's going to change our understanding of this animal

in pretty fundamental ways

And already, it's pushing the limits

of what scientists thought dinosaurs could do

We're going to be figuring out things as we look at the bones

that we never dreamed possible in a dinosaur before

From the deserts of Africa to Nazi Germany,

from the underground fossil trade

to the cutting edge of digital paleontology,

can we solve the mystery of the world's biggest predator?

I think Spinosaurus

is ready now to occupy its space in the pantheon of dinosaurs

Resurrecting a lost killer,

right now on this NOVA/ National Geographic special

The Moroccan Sahara, seven hours east of Marrakech

A remote, barren desert

But hidden beneath the endless sands

lies a treasure trove of fossils

Morocco's ancient rock

has preserved an amazingly complete record of life here,

from prehistoric insects and sea creatures

to crocodiles and dinosaurs

Today, they're a precious resource

The Moroccan fossil trade

brings in tens of millions of dollars a year

What you have here,

it's a little bit like a geology book, you know,

so you have fossils, you have trilobites,

you have corals, minerals

It's literally the history of life on our planet

laid out on these benches

That's why paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim is here

He's come to Morocco's fossil capital, Erfoud,

in search of one of the rarest,

most mysterious animals ever discovered

A killer even larger than T. rex.

Its name is Spinosaurus

Spinosaurus even by dinosaur standards

is one of the strangest, weirdest creatures

anyone can imagine

This animal's a fabled beast

I make the comparison to Nessie, the Loch Ness monster,

or the Sasquatch or the Abominable Snowman

Yes, there are pictures in books,

but we can't put our hands on the real fossils

Spinosaurus is one of the great mysteries of the dinosaur world

This is an animal that we know was enormous,

we know was very strange,

but short of that, we don't know that much about it

Spinosaurus tooth

Sharp, conical and very large teeth

discovered all across North Africa

offer telltale signs of this powerful predator

The problem is,

very few Spinosaurus bones have been found to go with them

Spinosaurus fossils are very rare

Teeth are actually a fairly common find,

but an associated skeleton?

Several bones that belong to the same animal?

That's something that happens once every hundred years

Nizar, a specialist in North Africa's ancient fossil beds,

has spent the last decade scouring museum collections

and fossil shops around the world

for elusive Spinosaurus bones

I was looking at everything

just hoping to find something that someone hadn't seen before

So I was starting to piece together

a basic outline of the skeleton,

but there was so many missing parts

It was very frustrating

Frustrating, but not unusual for North Africa

Fossilized remains of dinosaurs

have been notoriously difficult to find here

because of the vast distances and harsh desert conditions

It brings new meaning to, you know, a needle in a haystack

Nizar recently joined forces with paleontologist Paul Sereno,

a leading expert in African dinosaurs

You know what it's like digging in some places

in North America and China?

I mean, it's littered with bones

We've got dozens of skeletons of T. rex.

In Africa, it's a totally different story

You have this great Sahara Desert,

which extends literally in different directions

thousands of miles from where we are sitting here,

many without roads

You could spend a week here easily with an entire team

and not find one piece of bone

It's a challenge

Sereno has had more luck than most

In 1997, he discovered a predator named Suchomimus

in nearby Niger

The name means "croc mimic"

because of its long, narrow snout

He also found the only well-preserved skull

of Carcharodontosaurus, the shark-tooth lizard

That was an incredible find, this giant T. rex-sized skull

It had these stabbing six-inch teeth

Together with the remains of giant crocodiles,

flesh-eating birds, and Spinosaurus,

the few fossils found here indicate

that 95 million years ago,

this may have been the most dangerous place

in the history of earth

a habitat of giant carnivores covering much of North Africa

This is possibly unprecedented in Earth history

Big predators tend to be rare

It takes a lot of food

to feed a population of large carnivorous animals

It just seemed like a place that shouldn't really exist

It's a mystery Nizar believes he can solve

if he can just find another specimen

of the enigmatic Spinosaurus

But before venturing further into the desert,

Nizar's quest takes him to Germany

and the castle of an eccentric aristocrat, Ernst Stromer

The little we know about Spinosaurus begins with him

Ernst Stromer was a German paleontologist

He was really an explorer that wanted to find fossils

on virgin grounds

The year is 1910

Fossils are hard to come by in Germany

But across the Mediterranean in the deserts of Egypt

come reports of vast formations of ancient rock

Stromer is eager to explore them,

not for dinosaur fossils, but for early mammals,

to chart their diverse evolution

With the help of an Austrian fossil hunter

named Richard Markgraf, he scopes out several locations

The most promising, according to their crude geological maps,

appears to be the Bahariya Oasis

on the edge of the Sahara Desert

Stromer was used to going to nice restaurants in Munich,

living in a castle,

and here he is in the middle of the desert

It's hot, he's hungry,

he's not happy with the speed of the camels,

and it's a really difficult situation for him

Ever the meticulous scientist,

Stromer recorded his many travails

His granddaughter, Rotraut,

still has his many journals and photographs

My grandfather didn't throw anything away

If every generation were to do that,

the biggest castle would soon be full

Half German and half Moroccan,

Nizar feels a special connection to Stromer

His works offer valuable insight

into a man whose discoveries have been largely overlooked

The fact that Ernst Stromer was a great paleontologist,

one of the best paleontologists in the world,

had been forgotten,

was something that I thought was really tragic

So from a relatively early age, I thought,

"Well, one day, you know, we're going to restore his legacy"

Stromer's journals make it easy,

documenting every step of his three-week desert trek

He writes of rainstorms and sandstorms,

of frustrations with his crew

But when he finally reaches Bahariya,

his luck begins to change

Stromer describes some of the first-ever evidence

of the Sahara's turbulent past

and the creatures that lived here

"I find red layers

"preserving shark fin spines, fish teeth,

and to my joy, also small vertebrae of reptiles"

And then, at 8:40 a m on January 18

"I find three large bones lying next to each other"

"The better one is probably a thigh bone"

Poking out of the rocks,

Stromer finds enormous thighs, ribs, vertebrae and claws

They're not early mammals, but something much bigger

"Apparently, these are the first of Egypt's dinosaurs

I don't know how to conserve such gigantic pieces!"

Stromer wandered into an oasis

and wandered out with the first dinosaur bones,

really good dinosaur bones from Egypt

He didn't even know grossly how old these beds were

and he was going for a different reason,

and he found some of the weirdest dinosaurs

on the planet

The important thing is that he realized it

Stromer changes course from mammals to dinosaurs

and dispatches Markgraf

on more fossil-finding expeditions to Bahariya

Together, they introduce many new dinosaurs to the world

A large plant-eater, Aegyptosaurus

Killer carnivores Bahariasaurus and Carcharodontosaurus

And the biggest, most bizarre dinosaur of all

In 1912, Markgraf makes a remarkable find

in Bahariya's 95 million-year-old sandstone

Long chunks of spine, massive ribs, pointy teeth

and a well-preserved lower jaw

Back in Munich, it takes Stromer several years

to piece this unique creature together

He describes an animal with jaws like a crocodile,

smooth, cone-shaped teeth,

razor-sharp claws,

six-foot spines comprising a magnificent sail

and an overall size

larger than any other predatory dinosaur, including T. rex,

which had only recently been discovered in North America

Stromer was amazing

at how well he understood this animal

from the pieces that he had

He realized that he was dealing with something that was

like nothing else that had been found

anywhere else in the world

In 1915, Stromer dubs his animal Spinosaurus aegyptiacus,

the "spined lizard of Egypt"

For the next several decades,

the skeleton becomes a popular attraction

at Munich's Natural History Museum

But that all changes when the Nazis rise to power

An outspoken critic of the regime,

Stromer suffers terribly during the war

All three of his sons are sent to the front lines

Only one, his granddaughter Rotraut's father, survives

And if that isn't enough,

even Stromer's life's work becomes a casualty of war

We're in Munich here, Neuhauser Straße 51

This is the exact place

where the Spinosaurus skeleton was mounted

It was a great collection,

one of the biggest natural history collections in Europe,

so Stromer was very proud of the things he had found,

and he tried very, very hard

to have them put into a safer location

But the museum director, a dedicated Nazi,

refuses to move the fossils

And on the night of April 24, 1944,

hundreds of Allied bombers drop thousands of bombs on Munich

The museum is destroyed

Spinosaurus is lost to history

This is the only surviving image

of the mounted Spinosaurus skeleton

Just imagine you spend decades of your life doing research

and then in one night, everything is destroyed

The loss of his sons, of course,

was the biggest loss in his life,

but the dinosaurs were a very close second

Those were unique specimens,

and I think he knew that it was very difficult

to find fossils in the Sahara, and he was right

Stromer died in 1952

His journals and photographs survive

But without skeletons to grace exhibit halls

or fossils to study,

his dinosaurs are overshadowed by T. rex

and other more familiar beasts

Not having the original Spinosaurus skeleton

is a tremendous loss to dinosaur paleontology

We can't go and examine his observations directly

You had this fleeting glimpse of something,

and then it's gone

I mean, this is about as frustrating as it gets

for a paleontologist

60 years later,

Spinosaurus and the terrifying world it lived in

is as mysterious as ever

Over the decades, a few Spinosaurus bones

have turned up from across North Africa:

teeth, vertebrae and this partial snout

They're isolated pieces mostly, dug by amateur fossil hunters

and sold to private collectors on the black market

But if scientists don't know where they come from

or what they were attached to, they hold little value

We were tempted and teased by teeth and little tiny pieces,

and then a snout here,

but no skeleton, nothing associated,

nothing bone to bone

Nothing to piece together more than what Stromer had done

100 years ago

But then suddenly, everything changes

At the Natural History Museum in Milan, Italy,

Cristiano Dal Sasso receives a large collection of bones

from an Italian fossil trader

He's told they're from Morocco, likely spirited out illegally

They all seem to be from a single specimen

And they bear a striking resemblance

to Stromer's lost Spinosaurus

Cristiano quickly connects with Nizar,

knowing he'd been obsessing over Spinosaurus bones

for the last decade

They said that it's a large predatory dinosaur

and that I should see it

So I traveled to Italy

on my small doctoral student budget

and I saw this really amazing layout of bones on a table

Tall spines

Leg bones

Foot bones

Skull fragments

It was a collection of fossils

even more complete than Stromer's

I was just amazed

It was, you know

I had difficulty breathing, you know?

I was just thinking, "My God, is this what I think it is?"

Convinced the skeleton is Spinosaurus,

Nizar arranges to have all 60-odd bone fragments

moved to Paul Sereno's lab at the University of Chicago

to be systematically studied

When finally this specimen of Spinosaurus showed up,

we were picking our jaw up off the ground

Nothing made sense

Sereno expected Spinosaurus to be similar to Suchomimus,

the other meat-eater he had discovered in North Africa

Suchomimus lived 15 million years earlier than Spinosaurus,

around 110 million years ago

It too had a long snout, conical teeth and a sail,

so Sereno determined that it was actually a cousin

of Spinosaurus

But Spinosaurus had taken those adaptations to the extreme

We began to realize pretty quickly on

that this animal was no ordinary dinosaur

The team could see immediately

that some of the new Spinosaurus bones

matched the ones in Stromer's old photographs,

especially those characteristic spines

But now they had new bones that Stromer never had:

flat feet, hand and thigh bones,

pieces from the back of the skull...

The makings of an animal

more bizarre than even Stromer could have imagined

So this is really the jackpot

But all these bones are missing one crucial bit of information:

where they're from

Most fossils from Morocco are found by private collectors

and actually bought and sold on the open market,

and so when you do this,

the critical contextual information is lost

To truly understand a dinosaur,

we need to understand the rocks that it came from

Nizar has no idea where these bones originated,

but as he studies them closely,

he notices something eerily familiar

The cross-section of the spines

have unusual lines running through them,

perhaps fossilized traces of blood vessels

No one knows what they are,

but to Nizar, they're a smoking gun

He remembers seeing similar bones in Morocco

just a few years earlier

I thought, "This is something I've seen before

I've seen a small chunk of bone just like that one"

And I thought,

"Wow, I wonder if this is maybe the same specimen?"

If it is the same specimen and the bones match,

Nizar might be able to track down

the fossil hunter who dug them up,

the only person who could take Nizar

to the exact spot the dinosaur was pulled from

It's a long shot, but worth a trip back to Erfoud

Nizar has to rack his brain to remember details

of the fossil dealer who first showed him the chunk of bone

He vaguely recalls a tall, mustached man in a white tunic

It became clear very quickly

that that description fit many, many men in Erfoud

Everybody thought that I was crazy

This had never been done before

Moroccan fossils had been described for many, many years

and nobody has ever been able to trace them

back to the original site

With the help of British paleontologist Dave Martill

and Moroccan Samir Zouhri,

Nizar goes village to village, shop to shop,

chatting up the locals for clues

to the fossil hunter's whereabouts

I'm trying to find a needle in a haystack

Actually, it's much bigger than a haystack

It's a needle in the Sahara

Given Morocco's vague export laws,

Nizar needs to tread carefully

Dealers here are allowed to dig up and sell

all the common fossils they want...

Trilobites, ammonites, even dinosaur teeth...

But exporting rare fossils out of Morocco

without a license is illegal

Even if Nizar does find the man he's looking for,

there's no guarantee he'll agree to help

Those are some big teeth

There's some really nice specimens here,

but it's all isolated pieces,

so that's all they're finding here:

no associated skeletons

This is not where our skeleton came from, that's for sure

The trail in the fossil shops is going cold

Nizar decides to head south from Erfoud

toward Morocco's ill-defined border with Algeria,

where most of the country's fossils are found

Is he one of the diggers?

Yeah, he's one of the diggers

Oh, excellent

He should know where he's going, then

Diggers here don't have any special training

With shovels and other crude tools,

they bore tunnels straight into the rock,

pulling out any fossils they can,

often damaging them in the process

They're just digging to get out what is in essence

strange-looking rocks

They don't document the circumstances,

they don't document in most cases

where something actually came from

It's really like a Swiss cheese, lots of holes and openings

And of course there is no scaffolding,

no support structures, and it's pretty soft sandstone

People have died, and of course they are breathing in

all the dust every day

Very difficult work

Despite the risks, diggers depend on the income,

and paleontologists depend on them,

crude as their techniques may be

This is how most fossils are found

Most fossils are not found by professionals

You know, if they weren't doing this,

there's nobody else that has been out here

collecting things in a systematic fashion

So far, there's no sign of the mystery fossil hunter

Back in Erfoud, Nizar is ready to give up

My morale is very low

I'm just trying to figure out what to do next

You know, it's just being back at square one

And right in that moment

when I am at the very lowest point,

this figure walks past me,

and after just a few seconds, it became clear

that he was the man I was looking for

He was the one

Against all odds,

the man actually remembers meeting Nizar several years ago

He recalls showing him a chunk of bone

with lines running through them

And yes, he did dig up the rest of that skeleton

I can't believe my luck

Worried that the skeleton is now illegally abroad,

the man insists that his identity be concealed

Nizar tries to convince him in Arabic

to lead them to the dig site

He's concerned because he thinks

that if someone recognizes him, he might get into trouble,

so I explained to him

that this is not a fossil dealer situation

I am studying these fossils

I want to know where exactly they came from

and they'll return to the country of origin

The man agrees, finally, to take Nizar

to the site where the fossils were pulled from the ground

After nearly an hour drive, most of it off-road,

and a 30-minute trek up the side of a mountain,

the dealer leads Nizar

to a nondescript-looking hole in a hillside

Within minutes, in the fill surrounding the dig site,

they discover fragments of bones and teeth,

all but certainly Spinosaurus

This is amazing!

I mean, this will take some time to sink in, but this is amazing

It feels really surreal

The dealer explains

how it took two people digging for two months straight

to get the skeleton out,

and how he sold it to an Italian fossil dealer

for the equivalent of 14,000 U S dollars

This is the best thing he's ever found,

and he's never found anything even close to that

in terms of completeness

You find pretty bones,

but never, ever a partial skeleton

The fact that they were able

to relocate the discovery site of the skeleton is remarkable,

and it's going to provide

much needed information

about the environmental context of Spinosaurus

Within months,

Nizar rallies Paul Sereno, Cristiano Dal Sasso from Milan,

and colleagues from the UK and Morocco

to conduct a more thorough excavation

Wow, so this is it?

Wow

Their goal now is simple:

characterize the rock and landscape

to see when and how Spinosaurus lived,

and if they can, find more bones

Rather than boring tunnels straight into the rock

as the fossil hunter did,

the paleontologists excavate from the top

This is the overburden, the very hard rock

over the layer that had the Spinosaurus bones,

so we are widening this opening to the cave

until we can get a surface here

that is just about where the bones were found

We know they were found in a layer right down here,

so to move this layer is the pay dirt here

At the bottom of the hill,

Dave Martill takes a different tack,

sifting through the tons of fill

the local digger already discarded

All this stuff here is the overburden

that the original guy who made the discovery threw to the side

while he was trying to excavate the bones

But I don't think he was looking carefully enough,

so I'm going through all of this

He needs to pass a massive amount of material

through his sieve,

but after several hours, Dave strikes pay dirt:

chunks of cone-shaped teeth, even a piece of jawbone,

that are all classic Spinosaurus

Even from small bits like that,

I stand a chance of rebuilding the entire tooth,

which is what I intend to do

It's just that I've got

about three tons of material to sift through

The scientists scramble over the rocks for days,

retrieving and assembling

as many bits and pieces of the skeleton as they can

Cristiano exposes one of Spinosaurus's

characteristic spines,

similar to the ones Nizar recognized years ago

This is the same shape,

same size of the specimen we already know well

It is another confirmation

that this is the specimen we're looking for

As they piece together the bones,

the scientists are also looking carefully

at the rocks they come from

These layers comprise millions of years of geologic history

But can they reveal the habitat Spinosaurus lived in

and how he survived alongside the other giant carnivores?

We're above the dig site now

and we're looking at the cliffs that dominate this valley,

and you can see beautiful stripes, gorgeous colors

Each one of these layers

represents a change in the environment

Forests, lakes, rivers

As we go down through each of the layers,

we're going further and further back in time

And eventually, we get down to the layer with our Spinosaurus

Buried along with Spinosaurus

are very different kinds of fossils,

ones you might not expect to find

halfway up a mountain in the Sahara

This is full of lots of shells

We got this

That's, uh

That's a little sea urchin

Sea urchins, mollusks

Oh, that's lovely

That's a nautilus

Fossils of marine animals

dating back to the Cretaceous Period 95 million years ago

Back then, sea levels were over 100 meters higher

than they are today

Much of this place was underwater,

inundated by rivers and lakes and a massive ancient sea

Fossils of similar age found across North Africa

reveal that this lush ecosystem once stretched

from here in Morocco all the way to Egypt

And Spinosaurus, along with the other giant predators,

lived throughout all of it

It's meat-eaters, meat-eaters, and more meat-eaters

Here it is, this chamber of horrors,

this scene of carnage and destruction

It's a very, very striking image

Problem is, it's a scene

that continues to confound paleontologists

They've found all these fossils of carnivores from this period,

but relatively few herbivores for them to eat

This is unheard of

There's too many predators,

and when you look for the herbivores

that are found in the formation, you really have a tough time

I mean, they are not only underrepresented

in bones and teeth,

but it's hard to find a herbivore footprint

Stromer himself realized this puzzle

You know, there's all these big carnivorous things around,

but nothing, you know, nothing obvious for them to eat

Unless they were eating something else

There's another bivalve

There's lots and lots of bivalves

There are lots of shellfish in the fossil record,

but also much larger sea creatures,

like coelacanth, sawfish and lungfish:

a perfect meal for any dinosaur that could catch them

We're not talking about small little salmon

We're talking about giant

12-foot, 16-foot aquatic creatures

So one of these animals can easily feed

an animal the size of Spinosaurus, no problem

That Spinosaurus,

with its croc-like snout and conical teeth,

was built to catch fish

is an idea even Stromer had considered

Hey, guys, I've got some more of this tooth

Look at this

But in the history of paleontology,

no one has found evidence that any dinosaur

spent much of its life in water

If the new bones reveal Spinosaurus could,

it would be the first

And that may help solve the mystery

of North Africa's predators

Back at the University of Chicago,

the team quickly gets to work

prepping and analyzing their new fossils,

searching for any clues

that Spinosaurus may have been aquatic

A full century after Ernst Stromer

first studied and described Spinosaurus,

Nizar and Paul finally have a new skeleton to study

Extremely exciting

To hear that there was a skeleton, I was like, "Wow"

Paleontologists have been awaiting the discovery

of a new Spinosaurus skeleton

ever since the first one was destroyed

Now just imagine if we lost all of this in a single night

Yeah, well, if there is any threat

of a bombing raid here,

we are hiding these fossils in the deepest cave

Just to be safe, the first order of business:

copy the bones

While Stromer described all of his bones by hand,

Nizar and team use a CT scanner

to digitize theirs in bone by bone,

producing a three-dimensional picture

accurate down to a fraction of a millimeter

Back in the lab, paleo-artist Tyler Keillor

then manipulates the hundreds of files

and begins assembling a virtual Spinosaurus

We have just now

moved into the digital age for dinosaur reconstruction

in the sense that you can go literally from a bone

to a digital model of the bone to a digital skeleton,

which you can simplify enough that you can make it move

You can make it walk

You can ultimately put skin on it

The skeleton is about 40% complete,

a surprisingly high number compared to most specimens

Very few dinosaurs are known from a complete skeleton

There are lots that are known from a toe bone, a tooth,

in most cases just distinctive enough

to just tell you, "Yes, there was something there,

but that's all there is"

The digital model allows the team

to take their skeleton much further,

even incorporating some bones they don't actually have

Using scans of Stromer's original photos

and resizing the bones to match their specimen,

they can add in bits of jaw and spine that they're missing

For the parts on the back that we didn't have,

we're looking at Stromer's figures

That's a Stromer specimen?

Right, those are Stromer's

Scans of Suchomimus,

Spinosaurus's croc-snouted cousin,

help fill out the skull

Here is actually the Suchomimus brain case

It fills in the back end very nicely

Scaling and incorporating bones from other specimens,

they up their total from 40% to over 60%

Then it's a matter of fitting the bones together

Just getting the jaws to close properly takes 14 days

Our knowledge of Spinosaurus

comes from several different specimens

These aren't all the same size,

and so you can't just hodgepodge them together

like some kind of giant Frankenstein

You have to build the digital model in the computer

so you can get all the proportions correct

and give us a better conception of what the skeleton

of one of these animals would have been like

Taken together, the new specimen:

Stromer's, Suchomimus, and other isolated bones

The digital skeleton reveals an animal

every bit as extraordinary as Stromer imagined

50 feet from snout to tail,

the model confirms that Spinosaurus

is the biggest predator ever to walk the planet,

at least nine feet longer than the largest known T. rex.

Size does matter biologically speaking

because you wonder,

what are the ecological circumstances

that support such a large animal,

and that gets back to Stromer's conundrum:

how do you feed all these giant T rex-sized predators?

Stromer speculated that Spinosaurus could eat fish

But does that play out in the bones?

The foot is a good place to start

It's got a flat bottom

I'd never seen anything like this

The first time I set eyes on it, I said,

"What is this doing on this dinosaur?"

Most predatory dinosaurs scampered around

with narrower feet and curved claws

This foot's completely flat

I've never seen anything else like it

To make sense of it,

the scientists compare it to animals that are living...

At least they were until relatively recently...

Starting with dinosaurs' closest living relatives

When you're starting with a predatory dinosaur,

you think "bird" as your living analogy

And you have to start there, because they're bipedal

For all we know, this dinosaur had feathers

We don't know for sure

Turns out flat feet

are a handy feature for wading birds like flamingos

They help keep them stable in wet sediment

In lush Cretaceous Africa,

could Spinosaurus have used them the same way?

Surely a sensible interpretation to argue

that a fairly flat foot would help an animal,

particularly a large animal like Spinosaurus,

walking over a soupy substrate

You know, you don't want to get stuck there

The flat surface may even help propel them through the water

If potentially, they use their feet as paddle,

that's a whole other chapter

It reinforces the aquatic model for this animal

We may not be able to prove it in a court of law,

but it certainly makes the probability of our inferences

much, much more secure

For more evidence, the scientists look

to Spinosaurus's other living relatives,

crocodilians, which branched off from dinosaurs

about 200 million years ago...

Animals like this 250-pound tame alligator named Bubba

Bubba's a reptilian ambassador of sorts,

allowing Paul and Nizar to get much closer to a large reptile

than they probably should

Bubba is so kind to be able to lift up its hand

and spread the toes

so you can really see the anatomy of a live crocodilian

The potential for webbing on its feet

Its smooth, cone-like teeth

No bumps, no ridges, just basically a conical tooth,

which is your basic fish-eating tooth

Its long, narrow skull

Crocodilians in general,

when they become more fish specialized,

the skull becomes narrower and longer

Right, because you want

as little water resistance as possible

Even the sensitivity of its snout

Every little polka dot on every scale

is a special sensory cell

And we see all these openings

on the front of the snout of Spinosaurus

Used for detecting motion in dark, murky water,

the tail may also have helped

Combined with the flat foot,

it may have gracefully propelled Spinosaurus through the water,

much like this animal

Whoa, there he goes

See, look at that

He uses the tail to get going

The comparisons all point to a creature

that was well suited for getting around in the water

and hunting fish

But what about that giant sail?

Neither birds nor crocs have that

From the old research journals,

Nizar learns that Stromer had asked the same question

and had found one animal to compare it to:

the crested chameleon

Look at this

Right where that ligament attaches,

there is an expansion

That's right, they all have this broad base

Wow, that is absolutely neat

Sails evolved independently many times

Why isn't always clear

For storing fat?

Shedding heat?

Or as a display to warn off predators or attract mates?

A likely use for thin, narrow spines like these

I think this was display

It was to make yourself look bigger

Maybe there was competition for mates

Maybe the health, the size of your spine

was an important factor

With the animal comparisons in and the digital model complete,

there's only one thing left to do

The original bones will be repatriated to Morocco

But the team isn't confining its dinosaur to a computer forever

Thanks to machining facilities in Chicago and Toronto,

virtual Spinosaurus is becoming

the first life-size predatory dinosaur

fully realized from a digital model

Seeing it for the first time up close and personal,

Paul and Nizar are confronted

with just how massive Spinosaurus is

and how bizarre

It's front-heavy

You've got an eight-foot-plus sail

made of solid bone,

you've got an elongate trunk longer than most dinosaurs,

you've got massive forelimbs,

the most massive of any dinosaur,

a long neck,

and then a long skull cantilevered on this side

Where's the balance?

The skeleton towering over them

forces the scientists to rethink how Spinosaurus got around

you know, very different

from the mode of locomotion of any other dinosaur

It may have needed to use its long forelimbs for walking,

a first for predatory dinosaurs,

which so far have been strictly bipedal

While it hails

from the two-legged dinosaur group of carnivores,

it might be using those grabbing, grasping hands

to walk

Otherwise, it's going to fall on its lovely crocodile-like head

Of course, that's only when it was walking on land

More likely, the finding is another strong indicator

that Spinosaurus is different

from any other dinosaur ever discovered

It appears to have forsaken the land,

evolving over millions of years to thrive in water

It is one of the great mysteries of the dinosaur era

that every other major group has seemed to invade the water,

and no dinosaur had ever done this

Never a dinosaur with a fin for swimming

Never a dinosaur with anything we could point to

to say, "That was adapted for being in water"

This is the first time, and it's really exciting

With this revelation comes a long-awaited explanation

for how Spinosaurus and all the other monster predators

of Africa's Late Cretaceous competed for prey

Quite simply, they didn't

Some large dinosaurs would have preyed

on the region's limited meat supply

Spinosaurus may have only come up on land

when it needed to,

to lay eggs or move to another river

But put it in the water,

and it was perfectly adapted to hunt a boundless supply of fish

If one of you is feeding on fish

and the other one is feeding on large dinosaurs,

you're not in direct competition

And that means more large carnivorous animals

can occupy the same habitat

Paddle-like feet and powerful tail

propel it through the murky, turbid water

Sensors in the snout help home in on prey

And at precisely the right moment,

Spinosaurus does what its body is built to do

It all makes sense, you know...

Being big, having these strange proportions,

having these unusual feet, this big sail

Once you really understand the world Spinosaurus lived in,

all these adaptations make sense

And now Spinosaurus makes sense too

It's been an odyssey spanning three continents

and a hundred million years

But finally, it can take its place among giants

It is the weirdest large

largest predatory dinosaur

that we may ever find in our lifetime

But the saga behind this dinosaur...

The man who was associated with the first bones,

world wars, the contraband fossils...

It's a story that has so many dimensions,

it's going to be hard to top

Spinosaurus hadn't really captured

the public's imagination because it just wasn't real

It was like a made-up dragon

But with this skeleton, you know,

things are going to change

It's absolutely going to capture the imagination of the world

Spinosaurus, the world's first aquatic dinosaur

The largest predator is the lost killer of the Cretaceous