"armoured" spinosaurs

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

       If one carefully reads Ernst Stromer's original German papers, it is clear there is more than one individual being described (as the specimens are lost, speculations re: another genus are akin to giving taxonomic status to individual snowflakes), and the elongate neural spines have no centra. Thus, to say the original type consisted of dorsal spines cannot be proven. In fact, both Spinosaurus and Spinosaurus B, as Mr Stromer presented them, appear to be a disrticulated hodge-podge of elements. To state, as Jack Horner has done, that Spinosaurus probably had an eight foot long skull is based upon no known evidence, as is his idea the animal was 19 feet 7 inches high (including the "fin") and 43 feet 9 inches long. I am trying to be diplomatic: the 1915-2001 idea of Spinosaurus being an enormous theropod, with a Dimetrodon!
-like sail on its back, cannot be substantiated with any articulated skull and skeleton, and the cinematic conjuration (like the red "ceratosaur" fleetingly glimpsed with its nonsensical unicorn faciality, or the pteranodons with teeth) was, and remains, a Horrorwood fabrication, a means for Jack Horner to reinforce the concept tyrannosaurs were weak, sluggish "scavengers" (ironic, because spotted hyaenids kill nearly 75% of what they eat, and it is lions who do much prey stealing) on the basis of no scientific evidence. Young, rapid tyrannosaurs likely chased down and cornered large hadrosaurs for the slower, larger adults to kill with a bite power that is, let us say, of surprising magnitude. And so, we have a cinematic "spinosaur" which never existed, with a thinly constructed neck, surviving the bites of an enraged tyrannosaur (logically, the spinosaur's neck should have been quickly broken, or been decapitated), then breaking the tyrannosaur's neck and tossing it down!
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ike a doll. Coupled with this is the unfortunate use of "Spinosauridae" in various cladistic analyses, a nomenclatural chimera, as Spinosaurus remains a nomen dubium (along with Therizinosaurus).  Of interest are the relationships between Baryonyx and Suchomimus:  taxa having long forearms, narrow snouts equipped with non-serrated spike-like dentition. Perhaps like Iguanodon, they were probably functionally quadruped, and the long spines on the back could have been the bases for reinforced musculature to provide a balance for the heavy front part of the body including the head. Like a pair of pinchers, the jaws held prey, the long manal claws killing or disabling. Rather than a "fin", these animals may have looked more like hump-backed bison.  (I am here, I hasten to add, borrowing freely from Jack Bailey's fine 1997 paper on these taxa, and thank Jack for his penetrating  insights.)
       I agree with Jack Horner "fictional movie, fictional creatures"...with one qualification: I would not dignify the gutting of Michael Crichton's novels (regardless of thematic weaknesses in the first, and the fact the second was organized to protect his visions from the Horrorwoodization of creativity; he walked away from the third franchise) with the word "movie", even "cinema". I would, however, apply the word "cinema" only  to the artisans (Phil Tippett, Mike Trcic, et al.) who created the dinosaurs in 1993 and 1997, and, to a more limited degree, to the teams who created the ankylosaurs, brachiosaurs, stegosaurs seen in a dream-like arena (borrowed, needless to say, from a different montage in the 1990 novel) in 2001 (the pterosaurs, however inaccurate and anthropomorphized, were not given enough time). Because of the artistic enthusiasm for the animals at Stan Winston Studio and ILM, all of us paleontologists can appreciate t!
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 subsequent work (and I mean arduous striving for meta-physicality) presented by Frame Store and Evergreen Films, both organisations having sense enough to be "loyal" to the scientific community and not bombard us with a cellular-phonic spinosaur or barking dromaeosaurs said to be "talking"...coming from the fact that in 1997 and 2001 there were no actual writers.