Spinosaurus fossil tail discovered; Dinosaurs were not just land dwellers but swimmers too

The Discovery of a dinosaur fossil has caught the attention of scientists all over the world. This dinosaur fossil belongs to Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was equipped with a paddle-shaped tail and that helped the predator to swim through the water like a crocodile. This also threw light on the question of can dinosaurs swim? 

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According to a report in National Geographic, the Spinosaurus weighed seven-ton and was about fifty feet long. From the fossil of the dinosaur, it can be seen that it had a large tail on the back and a snout that made it look like a crocodile. After the dinosaurs’ tail was assembled, it required five tables to keep the tail.

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Can dinosaurs swim?

The discovery of the dinosaurs’ tails has led to the rise of the question of can dinosaurs swim? According to the journal Nature, this is one of the best aquatic adaptations that anyone has ever come across. The fossil was discovered in Morocco and this threw light on the way that the animals lived in those times. This has also given rise to contrary notions that dinosaurs did not live only on the land.

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According to a vertebrate palaeontologist Nizar Ibrahim, he referred to the dinosaur as a river monster. According to Ibrahim, this breed of dinosaur lived near the water bodies and dined on the seafood for survival. The presence of the cone-shaped teeth as discovered in the fossil of the dinosaur would have been very helpful for the dinosaur to catch slippery fishes. For a paper in Science in 2014, Nazir and his other colleagues reported that Spinosaurus had dense bones when compared to the other theropods. This could be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to aquatic life by this species of dinosaurs.

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The tail of the dinosaur showed bony projections on the vertebrae, long neural spines, and this led to the development of a fin-shaped tail. The theropods had usually stiff and inflexible tails but the Spinosaurus had a flexible tail. The power of the tail was tested via robotic controllers and plastic versions of the tail shapes. It was found that the tail of this dinosaur was better than the tails of the dinosaurs and at par, with the semi-aquatic animals we know about. Though the tail might be present only for display purposes, there remains a chance that dinosaurs were not completely land animals and that they too swam in the waters.

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