Scientists Found The Impossible In Newly Discovered Spinosaurus Fossils

Spino is among the most famous dinosaurs – we all know that. But were Megalodon, Mosasaurus or Pteranodon dinosaurs too? If you can't answer that, check out how our merch can help: https://wildsparks-shop.fourthwall.com/en-usd Makes a great gift, too! ____________________________ In this video: The heated Spinosaurus debate is no longer about one type of Spinosaurus, not even two. That number has just climbed to three. And the third one turns out to be the largest prehistoric predator ever confirmed on Brazilian soil! The first species in this story is a familiar one: Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. The second relative that surfaced alongside it, you know, too. It's called Spinosaurus mirabilis. So these two who were native to what today is North-Africa, aren't the news. But across the Atlantic, a separate set of fossils revealed something else entirely. We're talking about a third Spinosaurus-like predator, and scientists call it: Oxalaia quilombensis. Oxalaia lived an ocean away, yet matched the size of aegyptiacus and mirabilis almost exactly, down to the same oversized, hooked claws and the same interlocking teeth built for trapping fish. So how did evolution produce that same design thrice, on opposite sides of what is now the Atlantic? This video walks through how each one was found, why so much evidence is gone forever, and how a family split by the Atlantic Ocean still ended up looking almost identical. Start in Brazil. Oxalaia quilombensis was described in 2011 from a single fossil, the tip of a snout, pulled from the Alcântara Formation on Brazil's northern coast. That one fragment was enough for scientists to recognize the family traits right away. The genus name honors Oxalá, a deity from the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé tradition. Brazil already had a smaller spinosaurid on record, Irritator, described in the late 1990s, so a second one wasn't shocking. The size was. Fully grown, Oxalaia measured 39 to 45 feet long and weighed 5 to 7 tons, making it the heaviest confirmed predator ever found on Brazilian soil and one of the ten heaviest meat-eating dinosaurs discovered anywhere on Earth. Then came the loss. Every Oxalaia fossil ever recovered was housed at Brazil's National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, the largest natural history collection in Latin America. In September 2018, a fire tore through the building overnight and destroyed roughly 92 percent of its holdings, including every known Oxalaia bone. Paleontologists still cannot confirm whether the animal carried a tall sail or a low ridge down its back, because there is nothing left to check. Cross the Atlantic to Egypt and the pattern repeats. Spinosaurus aegyptiacus remains the longest predatory dinosaur ever confirmed, longer even than Tyrannosaurus rex, with adults reaching roughly 45 feet and nearly 8 tons. German paleontologist Ernst Stromer named the species in 1915 using fossils found in Egypt. Those fossils never got a fair chance at study. In 1944, an Allied bombing raid over Munich destroyed almost the entire collection, leaving researchers with nothing but sketches and a single surviving photograph. For nearly 80 years, every skeletal reconstruction of aegyptiacus, including the version shown in Jurassic Park III in 2001, was really just an informed guess. In a strange twist, that guess ended up looking more like Spinosaurus mirabilis than aegyptiacus itself, predicting a species that would not be confirmed for another two decades. Mirabilis has the strangest origin of the three. In the 1950s, French geologist Hugues Faure found one large tooth in the desert of Niger and filed it away as Carcharodontosaurus. Nobody looked at his notes again for almost 70 years. In 2019, paleontologist Paul Sereno staked an entire expedition on that old lead. His team pulled a jaw fragment from the sand, then uncovered a skull with a crest unlike anything ever catalogued. Several individuals turned up with skull material intact, each crest shaped slightly differently. The largest was only a subadult at 26 feet long, with a projected adult size of 40 feet and 4 tons. Spinosaurus mirabilis was officially confirmed in February 2026, exactly 70 years after Faure first picked up that tooth. So how did Oxalaia end up built almost exactly like its African cousins, on the opposite side of the planet? Paleontologists have three theories: a population crossed the Atlantic when Africa and South America sat closer together, the split happened earlier while the two continents were still joined, or Oxalaia is simply a misclassified, younger Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. For now it keeps a separate genus label, based on small but consistent skull differences: tighter tooth spacing, a thicker jaw, a straighter snout. A complete Oxalaia skeleton could settle the debate. After the 2018 fire, that skeleton no longer exists. #wildsparks #spinosaurus #dinosaur #dinosaurdocumentary