Spinosaurus, the gigantic pangolin of the Cretaceous?

I was made aware of this not long ago - it kind of looks creepy, but it gave me an idea:

Did Spinosaurus walk like a pangolin?

That is, with it's hands low to the ground but not touching the ground - so no knuckle walking - and maintaining balance as a biped...

This pangolin seems to maintain balance on its hind legs even though, on cursory glance, its centre of mass seems too far forward for that.

Spinosaurus is supposed to have had a dense femur, so maybe its centre of gravity was farther back than you'd think from overall proportions. Maybe the sail helped tip the scale back?

...or maybe it was a giant ant-eater? Those giant claws look particularly suited to breaking open termite mounds?

Who knows. This is me being silly, but thought it was hilarious enough to share...

Comments

Albertonykus said…

Certainly not the first time I've seen this comparison made!

13 August, 2017 23:41

Raptor's Nest said…

Cool! Are there any palaeortistic depictions of that - especially with the Ibrahim et al. proportions (or a revised one with shortish thighs)? I'm rather fascinated by this idea now.

14 August, 2017 10:02

The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

A quick divergence from my usual dinosaurs, and I shall talk about big cats today. This is because to my greatest delight, I had discovered today a wonderful book. It is called The Felidæ of Rancho La Brea (Merriam and Stock 1932, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication, no. 422). As the title suggests it goes into details of felids from the Rancho La Brea, in particular Smilodon californicus (probably synonymous with S. fatalis ), but also the American Cave Lion, Panthera atrox . The book is full of detailed descriptions, numerous measurements and beautiful figures. However, what really got me excited was, in their description and comparative anatomy of P. atrox , Merriam and Stock (1932) provide identification criteria for the Lion and Tiger, a translation of the one devised by the French palaeontologist Marcelin Boule in 1906. I have forever been looking for a set of rules for identifying lions and tigers and ultimately had to come up with a set of my own with a lot of help...

Old drawings: Allosaurus

Recently, I came across a stash of old drawings that I had completely forgotten about. I'll try and upload them in the next week or two. Some are palaeo, others are not, but still quite interesting nonetheless... Here is the first. I think it is an Allosaurus head. At least the skull looks like an Allosaurus and it has lacrimal horns like an Allosaurus , so it must be an Allosaurus . Nothing special I guess...

R for beginners and intermediate users 3: plotting with colours

For my third post on my R tutorials for beginners and intermediate users, I shall finally touch on the subject matter that prompted me to start these tutorials - plotting with group structures in colour. If you are familiar with R, then you may have noticed that assigning group structure is not all that straightforward. You can have a dataset that may have a column specifically for group structure such as this: B0 B1 B2 Family Acrocanthosaurus 0.308 -0.00329 3.28E-05 Allosauroidea Allosaurus 0.302 -0.00285 2.04E-05 Allosauroidea Archaeopteryx 0.142 -0.000871 2.98E-06 Aves Bambiraptor 0.182 -0.00161 1.10E-05 Dromaeosauridae Baryonychid 0.189 -0.00238 2.20E-05 Basal_Tetanurae Carcharodontosaurus 0.369 -0.00502 5.82E-05 Allosauroidea Carnotaurus 0.312 -0.00324 2.94E-05 Neoceratosauria Ceratosaurus 0.377 -0.00522 6.07E-05 Neoceratosauria Citipati 0.278 -0.00119 5.08E-06 Ovir...

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