Sandstorms once swept across Africa, burying the bones of a bizarre river-stalking predator deep beneath the dunes. Decades later, a field team from the University of Chicago expedition uncovered the first fragment of this skeleton.
Heat shimmered above the camp as technicians wrapped bone and logged its position with GPS. What started as a puzzling jaw fragment from a dune field grew, through careful comparison with known spinosaur material, into a central Sahara discovery and a recognised new dinosaur species built from a remarkable Niger fossil find nearby.
A scimitar-shaped crest in Niger leads to the first new spinosaur species in a century
During a 2019 University of Chicago campaign in the Sahara of Niger, a 20‑person team led by paleontologist Paul Sereno unearthed an oddly curved skull fragment. Later study showed this fragment to be a scimitar-shaped bone rising from the snout, a blade‑like crest that hinted at a new predator.
Back in Chicago, the fossil’s sweeping curve challenged every comparison, sending researchers into museum archives and forgotten monographs in search of anything that matched its strange profile. The connection finally emerged when the Paul Sereno team recognized a sketched head crest fossil in a 1950s French report on a saber‑shaped tooth, and a trusted Tuareg guide lead them back to the same remote outcrops in Niger used in early mapping.
From desert fieldwork to CT scans, the steps that rebuilt a digital skull
Work on the new predator did not stop at the first field season, or at the first crest, recovered from the desert floor in fragments. In 2022, Sereno’s team returned to Niger and established a makeshift solar-powered field lab, where laptops, cameras, and notes laid groundwork for a 3D digital skull assembly at the University of Chicago.
Back in Chicago, technicians and preparators handled the fragile Niger specimens with laboratory care, stabilizing cracks before deeper study. They then carried out meticulous teeth and bone cleaning and subjected each piece to high‑resolution CT scan analysis, generating digital models that revealed hidden sutures, tooth sockets, and the internal structure of the towering crest.
What the “hell heron” reveals about spinosaur diets, habitats, and inland rivers
The reconstructed skull outlines an animal with a long, low snout and narrow jaws, quite unlike the deep, boxy heads familiar from many meat‑eating dinosaurs. Along its jaws run rows of interlocking jaw teeth that mesh like a bear trap, equipping this fish-trapping predator to seize slippery prey in mid‑snap and lift thrashing fish from the surface of rivers.
Geologists working with the University of Chicago team traced the fossils to channels carved by ancient waterways, far from the Cretaceous coastline once fringing North Africa. Their bones lay in river sediment deposits, mixed with long‑necked herbivores, revealing an inland spinosaur habitat along broad Saharan rivers where this predator stalked fish rather than ocean prey.
