Episode description

No guest this week, just a lot of Dave talking. We’ve obviously mentioned his research at various times but never really focused on it before, but now a new and big paper has just come out on the famous giant fish-eating Spinosaurus so it was a great opportunity to kick off the new series with a special on it. Many people will know Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III and it has become (in)famous for various interpretations of its biology which has been hampered by the fact that the fossils are so fragmentary and researchers disagree over the taxonomy of various bits that may or may not belong to it. New discoveries and research has ramped all of this up and now Dave is stepping in with a long paper and a revised idea about how this enigmatic giant might have lived.

Links:

Here’s alink to the actual paper, assuming you really want to wade through it all: 

https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2021/3219-the-ecology-of-spinosaurus

And here’s the first of a series of blogposts Dave is putting up about the research and its implications: https://wordpress.com/post/archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/8723