Global Courant
The latest addition to the Field Museum on Chicago’s lakefront gives visitors a glimpse of the largest predatory dinosaur yet discovered through a 14-foot-tall cast of a Spinosaurus skeleton perched high above the museum’s main hall. hangs.
Field Museum officials on Friday unveiled the cast with its distinctive fin and crocodile-like jaws. It will be available to visitors from Saturday.
Scientists have long struggled to interpret Spinosaurus fossils to determine the animal’s behavior in life, uncertain whether it swam while hunting or simply waded into the water in search of prey. Field Museum researcher Matteo Fabbri said the cast is about 60% of a skeleton, the most complete specimen of the species.
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“Spinosaurus is a very strange animal,” Fabbri said. “The proportions of the whole body are incredibly strange compared to any other dinosaur. The tail is extremely long, the legs are incredibly short, and the skull is reminiscent of the one we find in modern crocodiles.”
A 14-foot cast of a Spinosaurus skeleton was unveiled Friday at the Field Museum on Chicago’s lakefront. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)
Fabbri is part of a team of researchers that published a paper in March concluding that the density of Spinosaurus fossils means they likely went underwater to hunt. The team compared fossils to other dinosaurs, extinct marine reptiles and living animals, including seals and whales, knowing that animals that swim underwater for food have bones that are nearly solid compared to those that remain on land.
The Field’s exhibit team decided to exhibit the Spinosaurus cast with that finding in mind, said Ben Miller, Field Museum’s exhibit developer.
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“We decided to put the Spinosaurus in a swimming position because that’s how it would have spent most of its life,” Miller said. “This is a semi-aquatic animal. It would have lived a bit like a crocodile, hanging out in rivers a bit, catching fish.”
According to the museum, a team of artists in Italy created the cast based on fossils found in North Africa’s Sahara Desert, where Spinosaurus lived nearly 100 million years ago. The original fossils are kept at the Hassan II University of Casablanca in Morocco.
The only other Spinosaurus cast can be seen in Japan.
Global Courant
The Field Museum’s Spinosaurus cast joins a cast of the herbivorous Titanosaurus in the main hall, dubbed “Máximo” and already a popular exhibit. That cast measures 122 feet wide by 28 feet long and represents the largest of all the dinosaurs discovered by researchers.
