The longest meat-eater
It was longer than Tyrannosaurus, though more lightly built.
The great hunters · Theropods
Spinosaurus
Spine lizard · SPINE-oh-SORE-us
A giant hunter with a long, crocodile-like snout and a tall sail of skin along its back.
- Size
- About 14 to 15m long; 6 to 8 tonnes
- Lived
- About 99 to 94 million years ago
- Found in
- Egypt and Morocco
Prowls after you, sail swaying. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the spinosaurus
A sail taller than a person
Spines up to 1.6 metres long rose from its backbone and held up a sail.
A dinosaur that swam
It had dense bones, a paddle-like tail and nostrils set far back, and spent much of its time in rivers.
A fish-eater
Its teeth were straight cones, like a crocodile's, for gripping slippery prey.
Destroyed in the war
The first skeleton, found in Egypt in 1912, was destroyed when a museum in Munich was bombed in 1944.
A new tail in 2020
A tail found in Morocco showed it was tall and flat, like a newt's.
The real thing
Photos of the spinosaurus
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Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Giant fish, such as car-sized sawfish, and anything else it could catch.
How we know
New finds in Morocco since 2008 have completely changed what scientists think it looked like.
Keep going
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