Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains. German researchers, with assistance from knowledgeable locals, began to excavate the huge dinosaur deposits in Tanzania in 1906. Russian teams sought dinosaurs on the Chinese side of the Amur River in 1916, and British geologists followed up on reports of sauropod fossils in India in 1917, first noted nearly a century before.

North Africa was another new frontier, one comfortably close to Europe and with enough influence from Britain, France, and other nations that many Europeans lived and worked there. The 1898–1900 French expeditions in Algeria — notable as much for their large contingents of soldiers aiming to subdue indigenous peoples as for their scientific zeal — had uncovered fossil teeth similar to those described by [Gideon] Mantell and [Richard] Owen from Britain, but considered them to be from fish. These specimens are now regarded as probably pertaining to spinosaurs as well, but their dinosaurian nature was still unrecognized at the time.

This finally changed thanks to the German paleontologist Ernst Stromer, who visited Egypt in 1910 and 1911 in pursuit of extinct mammal remains for the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology (Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie) in Munich. He collected numerous fossils from various sites on his long expeditions, with the Bahariya region and its Cretaceous-age fossils of central Egypt being especially productive. Stromer ended up naming several large dinosaurs and other reptiles from these beds, but the species with which he is most associated was found shortly after he left. Stromer had employed Richard Markgraf, an Austro-Hungarian (specifically from a town in what is now part of the Czech Republic), to continue prospecting in the Bahariya region and send fossils back to Germany in his absence. Markgraf was a renowned and trusted fossil hand who was employed by other researchers, including the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn.

In 1912, Markgraf made what would become his most famous find. Working with teams of Egyptians and Syrians and using funds from Stromer, his expedition uncovered the remains of a large and unusual dinosaur. The remains were shipped to Munich, with some crates delayed by the outbreak of war in Europe and the development of tensions between Germany and Egypt. A frustrated Stromer had to wait years for the entire set of fossils to arrive, finally taking delivery of the second shipment in 1922. While he waited, what emerged from the first shipment was an incomplete but extraordinary predatory dinosaur. The grey-brown bones were huge but fragile, and many broke during their cleaning and preparation, sometimes irreparably. They had been crushed and distorted by geological processes, and Stromer predicted that more of the skeleton had survived until recent times but had been lost to weathering.

Following preparation and repair, Stromer was faced with a series of teeth, a partial lower jaw, some ribs and a number of extraordinary vertebrae with elongate spines, some of which stretched up to 2m tall. Somewhat tall vertebral spines were not unknown among dinosaurs, but these surpassed anything on record, as they still do. This was clearly a new dinosaur, unlike anything discovered anywhere else in the world. In a meticulous 1915 description of the fossils, Stromer wrote:

[T]he establishment of a new genus and species is certainly justified, which I name, according to the most conspicuous character, the spinous processes of the trunk vertebrae, and after the land of origin, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.

This name, translated from Latin, means “Egyptian spined reptile,” and the specimen became the Spinosaurus holotype: the name-bearing specimen against which all future finds would be compared to see if they were the same or a different species.

Stromer wrote more on Spinosaurus in 1934, long after the second shipment of fossils had arrived. In addition to other vertebrate remains, this second shipment included a second Spinosaurus specimen, even less complete than the first, mostly comprising hindlimb bones and more vertebrae. Noting differences from the holotype but not wanting to erect a new species from such fragmentary remains, and also fearing that the short hindlimb bones might indicate that the specimen was a chimaera of two animals, Stromer named it Spinosaurus “B,” a place-holding, informal nickname that emphasised his suspicion that a second Spinosaurus species once existed.

Stromer’s reluctance to name a second species based on a poor-quality specimen was reflected in his approach to the first Spinosaurus reconstruction. In contrast to some of his contemporaries, who reconstructed artwork of dinosaurs known from scant remains and showed little hesitation in writing about their lifestyles and behavior, Stromer wrote in 1915 that it was better to delay reconstructions of Spinosaurus until as much material as possible had been amassed. Writing on the artwork and ideas shared by other dinosaur researchers, he opined that ‘skeletal reconstructions are made too lightly, even from very poor finds, and published speculations about [dinosaur] lifestyle are based on rather vague analogies’. He drew his investigations to a conclusion in 1936, in part because he had evaluated and described all the available Spinosaurus fossils, but also because the threat of another European war made the prospects of further Egyptian expeditions unlikely.

The metaphorical full-stop at the end of this process was to have a skeletal reconstruction of Spinosaurus illustrated by a colleague. The substantial anatomical gaps in the skeleton had to be filled in with other large predatory dinosaur bones, such as those of Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus — because what else was there to work from? — but Stromer’s reconstruction was remarkably precedent given the material he had to reference. Most impressive is the long length of the torso, the plunging rear region of the sail, and the relatively short hind limbs. These are features we still restore in Spinosaurus today, although they were overlooked by many artists who drew Spinosaurus in the following decades. Even so, the inspiration of Stromer’s skeletal reconstruction is plain to see in dinosaur art history, becoming one of the most copied models of Spinosaurus‘ appearance in 20th-century books, magazines, and other media.

Curiously, even as other German museums proudly promoted their dinosaur finds and research, Stromer and his Munich institution showed little interest in flaunting Spinosaurus. No casts or replicas of their Spinosaurus bones were shared with other institutions, and neither did they follow the fashion of mounting the remains in a spectacular display. The bones were instead exhibited modestly with, to our knowledge, no effort at exhibiting the size or appearance of Spinosaurus. Their location in the museum, along with those of Spinosaurus “B,” was significant as a critical moment in the study of spinosaurids drew near.

Allied bombing raids on Germany had increased as World War II approached its end, causing concerns about the vulnerabilities of museum collections among curators and researchers. The official Nazi line was that the German air force, the Luftwaffe, was all the protection that German museums needed, and that moving specimens to safe locations was not only unnecessary but unpatriotic. Among those calling for the safeguarding of fossils in Munich was Stromer, a long-term critic of the Nazi regime, who was only saved from outright persecution by his government through his aristocratic standing. His views were instead punished, as was standard in such a terrible regime, through his family: Stromer’s three sons were conscripted and immediately sent to the Russian front. Two never came home, and the third was captured, only returning from a Russian labour camp in 1951.

Even so, Stromer and his museum colleagues continued to petition the authorities to secure their precious specimens, and many surreptitiously removed smaller items in suitcases. Alas, nearly 2-meter-tall vertebrae are not so easily smuggled, and eventually, the inevitable happened. Hundreds of RAF bombers razed Munich on April 25, 1944, and the Bavarian State Collection took a direct hit. The fossil gallery, including the Spinosaurus holotype, Spinosaurus “B,” and countless other irreplaceable specimens, was destroyed.

This event cast a shadow over dinosaur research that is still felt to this day, for the loss of important specimens, especially holotypes, is no trivial matter. All that remains of the original Spinosaurus fossils are Stromer’s descriptions and illustrations, and a photograph of the holotype on display in Munich. As excellent and detailed as they are, these documents are no substitute for the data that can be gleaned from physical specimens. Eighty years after their destruction, no comparable Spinosaurus material from Egypt has been found that replicates these lost data, and any task involving Spinosaurus — including defining the species, erecting new spinosaurid taxa, or reconstructing spinosaur appearance — continues to be frustrated by this wartime loss. But any modern impacts pale into insignificance compared to those felt by Stromer, whose life’s work had been turned to ash. A careful, meticulous, and skilled paleontologist, he faded from renown following the war. His legacy was finally revived and his contributions to paleontology celebrated at the turn of the 21st century when Western paleontologists retraced his paleontological footsteps in northern Africa, leading to further discoveries of amazing dinosaurs.

Today, our interest in spinosaurids is ever-increasing. New fossils have come to light, both excavated by paleontologists and bought from fossil dealers, and specimens languishing in museum drawers labeled as “possible spinosaur” or “Baryonyx?” have received new attention. In recent years, this has included a partial pelvis from Brazil and, later, a huge snout that was given the name Oxalaia. A massive jaw fragment of a Spinosaurus from North Africa has shown that they got even larger than previously realized and might be some of the largest theropods to have ever lived (in length, if not mass — Tyrannosaurus and giant carcharodontosaurids compete for that record). New spinosaur finds have been reported from France, Spain, and Portugal, some of which have been named, and two new species have emerged from the Isle of Wight in the UK: Riparovenator and Ceratosuchops. There have been more teeth from Niger, too, notably including some from the Middle Jurassic that are far older than any other spinosaurid fossils. Additional new African Spinosaurus fossils have been revealed at academic conferences, some with tall, elaborate cranial crests.

A long research road lies ahead, but the work performed over the years has established the groundwork for our current understanding of the spinosaur group. Who, exactly, were the spinosaurs, and what were they like as animals? Thanks to decades of careful investigation, we can start to answer these questions.