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February 20, 2026<\/p>\n
3 min read<\/p>\n
Add Us On Google<\/span>Add SciAm<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Newly discovered horned dinosaur was like a unicorn from hell<\/p>\n Spinosaurus mirabilis was a force to be reckoned with<\/p>\n By K. R. Callaway edited by Claire Cameron<\/span><\/p>\n Spinosaurus mirabilis waded away from its inland home to hunt aquatic prey.<\/p>\n Millions of years before the Sahara became a desert, it was a vibrant ecosystem. Bordering the ancient Tethys Sea, which broke up the supercontinent Pangaea, the region was home to massive dinosaurs, including a newly discovered, terrifying predator that would have been as deadly on land as it was at sea.<\/p>\n This daunting creature, Spinosaurus mirabilis, stood between 10 and 14 meters tall and was crowned by a huge bladelike crest. Its discovery, detailed in a paper published today in Science, came almost by chance: the new species\u2019 bones were found in a known fossil hotspot. But the region is so remote that no researcher had been there for decades\u2014until Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues arrived in 2019. A local led the researchers to a site with some black fossils in the sand\u2014which turned out to be a treasure trove of fossils, including those from S. mirabilis.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew it was the jaws of a carnivorous dinosaur,\u201d says Daniel Vidal, a co-author of the new paper and a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n The find offers a new view into the evolution of Spinosaurids, members of a group that includes S. mirabilis, and reveals that some could hunt on both land and sea. Venturing from its inland home, the newly discovered dinosaur likely looked for prey by wading through shallow waters like a much fiercer and more massive version of a modern heron.<\/p>\n \u201cThis looks very much like [previously discovered Spinosaurids] but differs at the species level, and it\u2019s inland,\u201d Sereno says. \u201cOn the heels of admitting that this is a spectacular new species, I think this is one of the more important points of the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers returned to the desert in 2022 and found other pieces of S. mirabilis. Vidal made three-dimensional models of the bones right then and there so the team could start to piece the dinosaur together in real time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe could actually see a first glimpse of what this new species looked like before we had even finished the excavation,\u201d Vidal says. \u201cThat was really something that 21st-century paleontology can do.\u201d<\/p>\n These models helped researchers identify the head crest of S. mirabilis. It was so huge\u201450 centimeters\u2014that, at first, it confounded the team; the researchers had no idea what it was. But once they had identified it as a crest, it became one of the main pieces of evidence that S. mirabilis was a previously undiscovered species of Spinosaurid. Sheathed in a layer of keratin that might have been brightly colored, such a prominent crest could have conferred multiple advantages to S. mirabilis, perhaps by catching the attention of potential mates and warding off competitors.<\/p>\n All Spinosaurids had an impressive head crest, but none was so \u201cstriking\u201d and \u201cconspicuous\u201d as that of S. mirabilis, says Roger Benson, a paleobiology curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who was not involved in the research. Benson adds that he would be \u201creally excited to see more complete specimens of Spinosaurids\u201d to get a better understanding of their unique body proportions.<\/p>\n Other findings from the new species\u2019 skull and leg bones show that S. mirabilis was a formidable, semiaquatic hunter. Its interlocking conical teeth and long legs would have allowed the dinosaur to hunt on land, as well as to wade through the shallows and pluck sea creatures out of the water.<\/p>\n According to Sereno and his team, these anatomical features\u2014and the fact that S. mirabilis was found so far inland\u2014may be the final nails in the coffin for an older paleontological theory that Spinosaurids were entirely aquatic dinosaurs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was the close of an expedition that I feel may never be quite matched in the annals of paleontology,\u201d Sereno says. \u201cIt will go down as one of the great expeditions.\u201d<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. Scientific American<\/span> has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a Scientific American<\/span> subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm <\/span>always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.<\/p>\n If you subscribe to Scientific American<\/span>, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.<\/p>\n In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can’t-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.<\/p>\n There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" February 20, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Newly discovered horned dinosaur was like a unicorn from hell Spinosaurus mirabilis was a force to be reckoned with By K. R. Callaway edited by Claire Cameron Spinosaurus mirabilis waded away from its inland home to hunt aquatic prey. Millions of years before the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[10389,5178,1024,23174,5177,5338],"class_list":{"0":"post-44769","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-dinosaur","9":"tag-discovered","10":"tag-hell","11":"tag-horned","12":"tag-newly","13":"tag-unicorn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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