Anyone who, in a certain sense, calls their fossil-looking human contemporaries “dinosaurs” is underestimating the adaptability of real dinosaurs, says Nizar Ibrahim. The Spinosaurus at the very back of the Rosenheim locomotive shed, for example, has transformed within a single night from a land predator with occasionally wet feet into a predator from the crocodile class in the T-Rex format, preferably living in an aquatic environment, diving for giant fish.
This mutation, which was completed by Thursday morning with the assembly of a much higher and flatter oar tail, is not a testimony to lightning-like evolution, but the result of a small scientific revolution. It was triggered by Ibrahim, who himself supervised the renovation in Rosenheim. The researcher from the University of Portsmouth and his team unearthed a Spinosaurus in the Moroccan Sahara in 2019. The Lokschuppen, one of the ten most popular exhibition halls in Germany, sponsored the excavations and has now incorporated the results into its exhibition.
“Saurians – Giants of the Seas” is the name of the show, whereby the marine dinosaurs shown in the form of many fossils and casts as well as more than 20 life-size replicas were not dinosaurs in the strict zoological sense, but a completely different group of animals. Only this Spinosaurus, which has its own hall in the locomotive shed and is a popular photo motif with visitors, also counts as a zoological dinosaur. Research has long wondered why these dinosaurs never made it into the water, says Ibrahim. But they did, they were adaptable, see Spinosaurus. It is actually “the holy grail of paleontology” – also because it died out a second time in Munich in 1944.
There in the Bavarian State Collection the already few and also worldwide only bones of a Spinosaurus were destroyed in a bomb attack in World War II. The Bavarian paleontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach found them in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century and brought them to Europe in the usual colonialist manner. Stromer imagined his dinosaur to be similar to the T-Rex that had recently been discovered in North America, only with a large dorsal sail stretched out by the spinous processes of the vertebrae. So the generously supplemented skeleton stood in Munich until 1944, and so the Spinosaurus later haunted dinofilms, children’s books and exhibitions like the one in Rosenheim.
In his own words, Ibrahim also liked looking at dinosaur books, and as a researcher he followed in Stromer’s footsteps. From 2014 to 2019, he and his team dug in the border area between Morocco and Algeria, where there are rock formations similar to those at Stromer’s site in Egypt. During the lifetime of Spinosaurus 100 million years ago, a warm period without ice at the poles and with high sea levels, today’s Sahara was crossed by a huge river system and possibly a more pleasant place than today, apart from the dinosaurs.
Ibrahim finally found a much more complete skeleton than Stromer once did, including caudal vertebrae with long spinous processes, which were not previously known in dinosaurs. This and some other evidence suggest an aquatic way of life for the Spinosaurus and put it on the cover of the science journal in 2020 nature. In Rosenheim they would have loved to correct their model back then. The corona pandemic not only prevented that, but also, according to Lokschuppen boss Peter Miesbeck, the tour through international exhibition houses that the dinosaur show was supposed to undertake from Rosenheim. It can be seen in the engine shed until December 12th, now with an updated Spinosaurus and new 3-D prints of individual bones. The real ones stayed in Morocco this time. Nizar Ibrahim wants to help set up a natural history museum at the University of Casablanca.