What did Spinosaurus drink?

Water. That is the short answer and it is the whole answer, because it is the only one the evidence supports. What this page can add is where the animal has actually been found, how few times, and one thing about Britain that is true in a way most of the internet gets wrong.

Every find, and there are only 44

The Paleobiology Database holds 44 records of Spinosaurus in the entire world. For an animal this famous, that is a startlingly small pile. Every one of them is in Africa.

Morocco
22 records
Egypt
6 records
Niger
5 records
Tunisia
5 records
Algeria
5 records
Kenya
1 record

That is 6 countries. It is deliberately not a count of places or of digs — the database writes region names down as whoever recorded them typed them, so two spellings can mean one spot, and tidying them into a total would be inventing a number.

The records are not all filed under one name either. The database sorts them like this:

Spinosaurus aegyptiacus — 26
Spinosaurus — 16
Spinosaurus mirabilis — 2

Sixteen of them are recorded only as the genus, without a species: a bone identified far enough to say which animal group and no further. That is normal, and it is worth knowing that a lot of what is known rests on pieces rather than skeletons.

When

The database bounds the animal between 125.77 and 72.2 million years ago — from the Barremian to the Campanian, both names for slices of the Cretaceous.

Those two numbers are the outer edges of the oldest and youngest finds, not a birthday and a death. An animal is recorded from the moment somebody digs one up, which is not the moment it first existed, and the gap between those two things is unknowable from a list of fossils. What the world looked like across that stretch has its own page.

Now the British bit, carefully

Spinosaurus has never been found in Britain. Every one of its 44 records is African.

But its family has been. Baryonyx is a different animal that the same database files in the same family, Spinosauridae. It is recorded 12 times worldwide, and 4 of those are in England.

Two of the family’s finds sit close enough to a town this site already covers to put a distance on. These are measured from the middle of Brighton, using the town’s own record:

Baryonychinae
29.4 km from central Brighton · Tunbridge Wells Sand · Late Valanginian
Filed by the database as a subfamily.
Baryonyx walkeri
37.6 km from central Brighton · Weald Clay · Early Barremian
Filed by the database as a species.

So a relative of the most famous river-associated dinosaur in the world was dug out of the ground within half an hour’s drive of the seafront. Brighton’s own page has the rest of what that ground holds, and the same two finds appear on London’s page at a different distance, because distance depends on where you are standing.

What none of that tells you is anything at all about Spinosaurus. Sharing a family is a filing decision about names. It is not evidence that two animals lived alike, ate alike, or drank alike, and this page does not treat it as any.

What this page will not tell you

You came here about a specific animal, so here is the honest list of what this site cannot say about it:

Whether it swam.
Whether the sail on its back did anything.
What it ate.
How big it was, or how it compares to any other dinosaur.
How much water it drank, how often, or what it drank from.

None of that is in the sources this site uses. The database it draws on records what was found, where it was found, and when the rock it came from was laid down. It does not record how an animal lived, and this site does not fill that in.

You will find confident answers to every one of those questions elsewhere. Some of them are probably right. This site’s job is to be clear about which things it can show you the evidence for.

Back to the question

It drank water, because there was nothing else. And the genuinely strange part is not what it drank but how little of it has gone anywhere since. The arithmetic that follows from that is on its own page, and it is the reason this whole site exists.

The T. rex page does the same job for a different animal — and that one gets to land on a street in Denver, because the animal itself was actually dug up there.

Where this comes from

The fossils: Paleobiology Database, data service data1.2, read 2 September 2026. Licensed Creative Commons CC0. Counts are the database’s own, and each one was checked against a second figure the database publishes separately — the ingestion stops if the two disagree.
How sure is this?: The counts are exact for what the database holds, and the database is not the world: it holds what has been found, dug up and written down. The two Brighton distances are straight-line, from the town centre to published coordinates that are themselves rounded, so treat them as “about that far”. Ages are the outer bounds of the finds and are not the animal’s lifespan. And no age here was read off a bone: every one is reconstructed from the rock a specimen came out of, so they are estimates with a spread rather than exact dates, which is why each carries two numbers instead of one.