Fw: Spinosaurus again

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Forwarded on request:

> > I'm sure too that no one ever accused Stromer of fakery, my sentence was
> > badly written.
> >
> > To come back to Spinosaurus aegyptiacus...
> > If I summarize briefly:
> > all the bones except the proximal caudal are definitely theropod and some
> > are tetanuran. The three series of vertebrae (cervical, dorsal, caudal)
> > are not thought to come from one taxon (not articulated, mismatching
> > centra, etc..) and there lies the doubt. This is the point I don't get,
> > Spinosaurus being a quite new type of dinosaur at this time and even now,
> > you cant't expect it to "fall" into pre-calibrated "families", IMVHO; 
> > look at
> > feathered non-avian theropods, who could have guessed they ever existed
> > before the Liaoning finds [ok, cladistics could have predicted it :-] .

Several people did predict them. The oldest illustrations of theropods with 
feathers are from the early 1980s.

> > The skull is definitely close to the Baryonyx/Suchomimus clade. The 
> > centra
> > don't seem to match, but for sure, there was a carnivorous dinosaur with 
> > high
> > spines, and the skull, even if it belonged to a different taxon, 
> > pertained to a
> > clade of relatively high-spined tetanurans. My question: how many 
> > different
> > theropod taxa with Suchomimus-like skull and/or Suchomimus-like spines 
> > are
> > likely to have lived at the same time in the same place (along with 
> > others like
> > Carcharodontosaurus, Bahariasaurus, etc..)?
> >
> > Cheers, Jean-Michel