How did we unearth the largest predator in history? (2024)

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MANOUSH ZOMORODI, HOST:

We want to wrap up our show about What Lies Beneath with a paleontologist. Recently, researchers reported that they believe the Spinosaurus may be the largest-ever carnivore in history, and that finding builds on the work of paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, who in 2014 found the fossils that proved the Spinosaurus hunted its prey in rivers 97 million years ago. Here he is on the TED stage.

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NIZAR IBRAHIM: These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizarre. They're beautiful. And there's very little we know about them. I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a giant predatory dinosaur called spinosaurus. A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and was described about a hundred years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we are left with are just a few drawings and notes. From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big. It had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail. And it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile. But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next hundred years.

My field work took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions. And it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens, the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home to a giant car-sized (unintelligible), a monster sawfish. And the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine.

So we're finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside spinosaurus, but spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We were just finding bits and pieces. And I was hoping that we would find a partial skeleton at some point. Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of spinosaurus. We returned to the site. We collected more bones. And so after a hundred years, we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature, and we were able to reconstruct it. We now know that spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from T. Rex.

But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones. We had skull bones with paddle-shaped feet, wide feet - very unusual. No other dinosaur has feet like this. And we think that may have been used to walk on soft sediment or maybe for paddling in the water. We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of spinosaurus bones. And it turns out that they're very dense and compact, so that's useful for buoyancy control in the water. We CT scanned all of our bones and built a digital spinosaurus skeleton.

And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that, yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than T-Rex. And yes, the head has fish-eating written all over it. But really, the entire skeleton has water-loving written all over it - dense bone, paddle-like feet. And the hind limbs are reduced in size. And again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. So as we fleshed out our spinosaurus, I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin. We realized that we are dealing with a river monster, predatory dinosaur bigger than T-Rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants feeding on the many aquatic animals. So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other.

And some people told me, wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. There are not many things left to discover in the world, right? Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the Sahara is so full of treasures. And when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter Roy Chapman Andrews. And he said, "always there has been an adventure just around the corner. And the world is still full of corners." That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines, and it is still true today. Thank you.

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ZOMORODI: That's paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim. You can find both his talks at TED.com.

Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about What Lies Beneath. This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, James Delahoussaye, Fiona Geiran, Sylvie Douglis and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Katie Simon, Rachel Faulkner and James Delahoussaye. Our TED Radio production staff also includes Diba Mohtasham and Margaret Cirino. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarboe. Many thanks to Catherine Cypher (ph) for her help with this episode, too. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case and Daniella Balarezo.

I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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