Paws Off!
Name-calling
“No fair!” That’s a complaint that everyone who’s ever been a human child—surely even you—has bellowed at the tops of their lungs one time or another. But what about dinosaurs? Did they care about fairness? This burning question was raised last week by an exciting but curious announcement.
The beaches on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, are a hotbed of fossil hunting—Dinosaur Island, it’s sometimes called. But there are bones, and then there are bones. The news last week was that paleontologists had recently unearthed partial skeletons of two previously unknown predatory species. Both are members of the spinosaurid family, distinguished by long, snouty skulls. Both grew to nearly 30 feet long. Both ate fish and smaller, unlucky dinosaurs. Both lived 125 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period. Both sound pretty fearsome.