Palaeontologists are finding more dinosaur remains than ever before, and with new technology they can now peer inside these creatures’ brains, understand their sensory anatomy and reconstruct whole skeletons from fragmentary remains. Applying novel techniques to a single Spinosaurus skeleton discovered in Morocco, researchers have revealed that this dinosaur was perfectly adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. “It has really narrow jaws, which is great if you want to close them rapidly underwater,” says Nizar Ibrahim at the University of Portsmouth, UK. The dinosaur had a paddle-like tail, which would have provided significantly more thrust than the tails of other predatory dinosaurs, as well as very dense bones, an adaptation believed to assist with buoyancy. Ibrahim helped bring these details to life in the new BBC series, Walking with Dinosaurs.
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