page_title: Spinosaurus
section_title: Specimens
hierarchical_section_title: Spinosaurus / Discovery and naming / Specimens
caption_attribution_description: Spinosaurus marocannus jaw fossil (MNHN SAM 124), Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris.
context_page_description: Spinosaurus is a genus of spinosaurid dinosaur that lived in what now is North Africa during the upper Albian to upper Turonian stages of the Cretaceous period, about 112 to 93.5 million years ago. This genus was known first from Egyptian remains discovered in 1912 and described by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1915. The original remains were destroyed in World War II, but additional material has come to light in the early 21st century. It is unclear whether one or two species are represented in the fossils reported in the scientific literature. The best known species is S. aegyptiacus from Egypt, although a potential second species, S. maroccanus, has been recovered from Morocco. The contemporary spinosaurid genus Sigilmassasaurus has also been synonymized by some authors with S. aegyptiacus, though other researchers propose it to be a distinct taxon. Another possible junior synonym is Oxalaia from the Alcântara Formation in Brazil.
  Spinosaurus was among the largest of all known carnivorous dinosaurs, nearly as large as or even larger than other theropods such as Tyrannosaurus, Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus.
context_section_description: Six main partial specimens of Spinosaurus have been described.
  BSP 1912 VIII 19, described by Stromer in 1915 from the Bahariya Formation, was the holotype.  The material consisted of the following items, most of which were incomplete: right and left dentaries and splenials from the lower jaw measuring 75 centimeters (30 in) long; a straight piece of the left maxilla that was described but not drawn; 20 teeth; 2 cervical vertebrae; 7 dorsal (trunk) vertebrae; 3 sacral vertebrae; 1 caudal vertebra; 4 thoracic ribs; and gastralia. Of the nine neural spines whose heights are given, the longest ("i," associated with a dorsal vertebra) was 1.65 meters (5.4 ft) in length. Stromer claimed that the specimen was from the early Cenomanian, about 97 million years ago.
  This specimen was destroyed in World War II, specifically "during the night of 24/25 April 1944 in a British bombing raid of Munich" that severely damaged the building housing the Paläontologisches Museum München (Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology). However, detailed drawings and descriptions of the specimen remain. Stromer's son donated Stromer's archives to the Paläontologische Staatssammlung München in 1995, and Smith and colleagues analyzed two photographs of the Spinosaurus holotype specimen BSP 1912 VIII 19 discovered in the archives in 2000. On the basis of a photograph of the lower jaw and a photograph of the entire specimen as mounted, Smith concluded that Stromer's original 1915 drawings were slightly inaccurate.  In 2003, Oliver Rauhut suggested that Stromer's Spinosaurus holotype was a chimera, composed of vertebrae and neural spines from a carcharodontosaurid similar to Acrocanthosaurus and a dentary from Baryonyx or Suchomimus. This analysis was rejected in at least one subsequent paper.
  NMC 50791, held by the Canadian Museum of Nature, is a mid-cervical vertebra which is 19.5 centimeters (7.7 in) long from the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco. It is the holotype of Spinosaurus maroccanus as described by Russell in 1996. Other specimens referred to S. maroccanus in the same paper were two other mid-cervical vertebrae (NMC 41768 and NMC 50790), an anterior dentary fragment (NMC 50832), a mid-dentary fragment (NMC 50833), and an anterior dorsal neural arch (NMC 50813).  Russell stated that "only general locality information could be provided" for the specimen, and therefore it could be dated only "possibly" to the Albian.
  MNHN SAM 124, housed at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, is a snout (consisting of partial premaxillae, partial maxillae, vomers, and a dentary fragment). Described by Taquet and Russell in 1998, the specimen is 13.4 to 13.6 centimeters (5.3–5.4 in) in width; no length was stated. The specimen was located in Algeria, and "is of Albian age." Taquet and Russell believed that this specimen along with a premaxilla fragment (SAM 125), two cervical vertebrae (SAM 126-127), and a dorsal neural arch (SAM 128), belonged to S. maroccanus.
  BM231 (in the collection of the Office National des Mines, Tunis) was described by Buffetaut and Ouaja in 2002.  It consists of a partial anterior dentary 11.5 centimetres (4.53 in) in length from an early Albian stratum of the Chenini Formation of Tunisia. The dentary fragment, which included four alveoli and two partial teeth, was "extremely similar" to existing material of S. aegyptiacus.
  UCPC-2 in the University of Chicago Paleontological Collection consists mainly of two narrow connected nasals with a fluted (ridged) crest from the region between the eyes. The specimen, which is 18.0 centimetres (7.09 in) long, was located in an early Cenomanian part of the Moroccan Kem Kem Beds in 1996 and described in the scientific literature in 2005 by Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Civic Natural History Museum in Milan and colleagues.
  MSNM V4047 (in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano), described by Dal Sasso and colleagues in 2005, consists of a snout (premaxillae, partial maxillae, and partial nasals) 98.8 centimetres (38.9 in) long from the Kem Kem Beds. Like UCPC-2, it is thought to have come from the early Ce
caption: Specimen MNHN SAM 124 of S. maroccanus, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris
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