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Journal of Paleontology

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NEW INFORMATION REGARDING THE HOLOTYPE OF SPINOSAURUS AEGYPTIACUS STROMER, 1915

¹ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Washington University, 1 Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1169, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899, USA, <smithjb@wustl.edu>,
² Department of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, 240 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia 19104-6316, USA,
³ Paläontologisches Museum, Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie, Richard-Wagner-Strasse 10/II, D-80333 München, Germany,
⁴ Department of Biosciences and Biotechnology, Drexel University, 32nd and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
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 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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