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.
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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.
What one paper says about how it lived
The fossil database records where Spinosaurus was found, never how it lived. For that you need papers, and one of them — by Myhrvold and colleagues, in 2024 — opens its summary with these two sentences:
“The lifestyle of spinosaurid dinosaurs has been a topic of lively debate ever since the unveiling of important new skeletal parts for Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in 2014 and 2020. Disparate lifestyles for this taxon have been proposed in the literature; some have argued that it was semiaquatic to varying degrees, hunting fish from the margins of water bodies, or perhaps while wading or swimming on the surface; others suggest that it was a fully aquatic underwater pursuit predator.”
Nathan P. Myhrvold, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Daniel Vidal and others (2024). Diving dinosaurs? Caveats on the use of bone compactness and pFDA for inferring lifestyle. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0298957. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Quotation unchanged.
Those are the paper’s words, not this site’s. They report what different people have proposed. They do not settle it, and this page does not try to either.
Two of the papers in that argument cannot be quoted here. Both were published in Nature, and neither shares a single author with Myhrvold and colleagues:
“Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur”
Nizar Ibrahim, Simone Maganuco, Cristiano Dal Sasso, Matteo Fabbri, Marco Auditore, Gabriele Bindellini, David M. Martill, Samir Zouhri, Diego A. Mattarelli, David M. Unwin, Jasmina Wiemann, Davide Bonadonna, Ayoub Amane, Juliana Jakubczak, Ulrich Joger, George V. Lauder, Stephanie E. Pierce · Nature, 2020 · doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2190-3
“Subaqueous foraging among carnivorous dinosaurs”
Matteo Fabbri, Guillermo Navalón, Roger B. J. Benson, Diego Pol, Jingmai O’Connor, Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, Gregory M. Erickson, Mark A. Norell, Andrew Orkney, Matthew C. Lamanna, Samir Zouhri, Justine Becker, Amanda Emke, Cristiano Dal Sasso, Gabriele Bindellini, Simone Maganuco, Marco Auditore, Nizar Ibrahim · Nature, 2022 · doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04528-0
What is inside those two papers, this page cannot show you. Their publisher has not licensed their words for anyone to reuse, so their titles are here and their arguments are not — and this page will not retell their conclusions in its own words as a way round that.
That leaves the page quoting only the paper whose licence happens to allow it. A licence is a fact about a publisher, not about which idea is right, which is why the other two are named in full rather than left out, and why this page quotes one paper and no more: counting the papers it is allowed to quote would measure licences, not evidence.
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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 fossil database this page is built on. The database 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.
For teachers
For school
- Spinosaurus has never been found in Britain. Every one of its 44 records is African.
- The fossil database records where Spinosaurus was found, never how it lived.
- Sharing a family is a filing decision about names.
Classroom prompt
This page ends with a list of things it cannot tell you about Spinosaurus. Choose one. Apart from where a bone was dug up and how old the rock around it is, what would somebody need to find before they could answer it?
Extension: Baryonyx has been dug up in England. The database files it in the same family as Spinosaurus. Write one true sentence about each animal, making sure neither sentence borrows a fact that belongs to the other.
Ages: “found in one place, never found in another” works from about seven; keeping a family fact from turning into a fact about how an animal lived suits pupils of about ten upwards, and that range is our teaching choice for this page, not a curriculum claim.
Where this comes from
- The fossils
- Paleobiology Database, data service data1.2, read . 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.
- The papers
- Nathan P. Myhrvold, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Daniel Vidal and others (2024). Diving dinosaurs? Caveats on the use of bone compactness and pFDA for inferring lifestyle. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0298957. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Quotation unchanged. The two quoted sentences are checked against the article’s own published XML every time this site is built. The two Nature papers are named from their publisher’s own bibliographic record and are not reproduced.
- 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.
Bring the question to class
A ready-to-use dinosaur water lesson helps pupils separate what an answer supports from what it cannot tell us. Find preparation and classroom adaptation notes.
Where next
Spinosaurus is one of several animals this site asks the water question about, and the dinosaur water pages gather the rest. Whether dinosaurs could drink seawater is a question this site answers from named papers rather than from a fossil database. And if you would rather start from where you live, the places pages show which parts of the world were once underwater.