An expert underwater hunter or a shoreline predator: the debate among paleontologists is reignited on the lifestyle of the famous spinosaurus, the largest predatory dinosaur of all time which 95 million years ago swam in the rivers of what is now North Africa.
The scientific comparison is reopened by the study by the University of Chicago, which in the journal Plos One casts doubt on the conclusions of a previous work (published in Nature by an international group with a strong Italian participation) in which the focus was on bone density of the animal to demonstrate its underwater hunting.
The work, published in 2022 by a team led by the Italian paleontologist Matteo Fabbri, was carried out in the laboratories and collections of naturalistic museums around the world, dissecting and observing under the microscope the bones of reptiles, mammals and birds, both fossil and current, as well as those of the spinosaur and two of its 'cousins', the spinosaurids Baryonyx and Suchomimus.
From a complex statistical analysis it emerged that the bones of the spinosaurus were among the densest and most compact in the entire animal kingdom and probably served as ballast to facilitate its diving for hunting.
The new study, coordinated by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, claims that the statistical method and data used were imprecise and inappropriate, so much so as to invalidate the results obtained, and for this reason indicates new guidelines for future research.
Matteo Fabbri himself responds point by point to these criticisms, who currently works as a post-doc at the University of Chicago.
"Our statistical method has already been used in other studies of biological evolution and allowed us to obtain results with an accuracy of 85%, a value that allows us to say with reasonable certainty that the Spinosaurus swam," explains the paleontologist at ANSA.
"Our model, among other things, is based on the study of modern animals and I don't understand why what is valid for current animals cannot also be valid for extinct ones. On the contrary, their 3D model, according to which one An eight-ton spinosaurus would have been less dense than a 500-gram chicken."
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