The newest addition to the Field Museum on Chicago’s lakefront will give visitors a glimpse of the largest predatory dinosaur yet discovered via a 46-foot cast of a Spinosaurus skeleton suspended high above the museum’s main hall.
Field Museum officials unveiled the cast with its distinctive fin and crocodile-like jaws on Friday. It will be available for visitors starting Saturday.
Scientists have long struggled to interpret Spinosaurus fossils to determine the animal’s behavior in life, uncertain whether it swam while hunting or simply waded into water in search of prey. Field Museum researcher Matteo Fabbri said the cast is about 60% of a skeleton, the most complete specimen of the species.
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“We decided to put Spinosaurus in a swimming pose because that’s how it would have spent most of its life,” Miller said. “This is a semiaquatic animal. It would have lived kind of like a crocodile, kind of hanging around in rivers, catching fish.”
According to the museum, a team of artists in Italy created the cast based on fossils found in northern Africa’s Sahara Desert where the Spinosaurus lived nearly 100 million years ago. The original fossils are kept at the Hassan II University of Casablanca in Morocco.
