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New information regarding the holotype of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus Stromer, 1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2015

Joshua B. Smith ,
Matthew C. Lamanna ,
Helmut Mayr  and
Kenneth J. Lacovara
Joshua B. Smith
Affiliation:
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Washington University, 1 Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1169, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899, USA,
Matthew C. Lamanna
Affiliation:
Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, 240 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia 19104-6316, USA
Helmut Mayr
Affiliation:
Paläontologisches Museum, Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Richard-Wagner-Strasse 10/II, D-80333 München, Germany
Kenneth J. Lacovara
Affiliation:
Department of Biosciences and Biotechnology, Drexel University, 32nd and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
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Extract

In the autumn of 1912, the fossil collector Richard Markgraf, with financial support and direction from Bavarian paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, discovered the partial skeleton of a bizarre predatory dinosaur in Upper Cretaceous (early Cenomanian, ~97 Ma, see Ismail et al., 1989; Barakat et al., 1993; El Beialy, 1994, 1995; Nabil and Hussein, 1994; Ismail and Soliman, 2001; Ibrahim, 2002; Gradstein et al., 2005) rocks of the Bahariya Formation exposed in the Bahariya Oasis of western Egypt (Fig. 1, see also Sereno et al., 1998; Nothdurft et al., 2002). This gigantic theropod, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus Stromer, 1915, possessed highly derived cranial and vertebral features sufficiently distinct for it to be designated as the nominal genus of the clade Spinosauridae (Stromer, 1915, 1936). Spinosaurids, currently definitively known only from Europe, South America, and Africa, are important because of the scarcity of Cretaceous Gondwanan tetrapod fossils (see Krause et al., 1999, 2003; Carrano et al., 2002; Lamanna et al., 2002). Moreover, fossils of Spinosaurus Stromer, 1915 and other spinosaurids are significant because of controversy surrounding the postulated paleoecology of these taxa (see discussions in Charig and Milner, 1997; Sereno et al., 1998; Sues et al., 2002). Questions related to spinosaurid paleoecology are particularly important in the Bahariya Formation, where Spinosaurus appears to have shared its habitat (see Stromer, 1936; Smith et al., 2001) with at least two other theropods in the size range of Tyrannosaurus Osborn, 1905 (Bahariasaurus Stromer, 1934 and Carcharodontosaurus Stromer, 1931). Unfortunately, the holotype and only known indisputable specimen of S. aegyptiacus (BSP 1912 VIII 19) was lost during the night of 24/25 April 1944 in a British bombing raid of Munich (Nothdurft et al., 2002). The attack severely damaged the building (dating to ca. 1583, Nöhbauer, 1987) that housed the Paläontologische Staatssammlung München and destroyed most of Stromer's Bahariya collection (see Appendix 1). Since 1944, new spinosaurid taxa have been described (see Charig and Milner, 1986; Martill et al., 1996; Sereno et al., 1998; Sues et al., 2002) and additional material has been referred to Spinosaurus (e.g., Buffetaut, 1989, 1992; Russell, 1996; Taquet and Russell, 1998; Benton et al., 2000; Buffetaut and Ouaja, 2002), some of it questionably. However, definitive S. aegyptiacus material, or information regarding the original specimen of Spinosaurus, has not been forthcoming.

Type
Paleontological Notes
Information
Journal of Paleontology , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , March 2006 , pp. 400 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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