Spinosaurus: Stromer's Egyptian Find and Its Loss in 1944

Spinosaurus is a giant predatory dinosaur first discovered in 1912 in the Bahariya Oasis of Egypt’s Western Desert and named Spinosaurus aegyptiacus by the German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer in 1915. Its most striking feature was a row of enormously tall spines on its back that probably supported a sail. The original fossils were destroyed in a bombing raid on Munich in April 1944, and for decades the animal was known almost only from Stromer’s drawings, until new finds in North Africa brought it back to scientific attention.

Background: Stromer and the Egyptian desert

Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach (1871–1952) was a Bavarian aristocrat and palaeontologist based in Munich. He was interested in the early history of African animals and travelled in Egypt’s deserts in the early 20th century. In 1911 he visited the Bahariya Oasis, a depression in the Western Desert where rocks of the mid-Cretaceous period are exposed.

To carry on the work, Stromer employed Richard Markgraf, a German fossil collector who lived in Egypt and had already worked for other European scientists. Markgraf suffered from poor health, but he knew the desert well and was a skilled excavator.

The discovery and Stromer’s description

In 1912 Markgraf excavated the remains of a large meat-eating dinosaur at Bahariya. The material included part of the lower jaws with teeth, a number of vertebrae, ribs and, most remarkably, back vertebrae with spines up to about 1.65 metres tall. The fossils were shipped to Munich, where Stromer studied them.

In 1915, during the First World War, Stromer published his description and named the animal Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, “Egyptian spine lizard”. He recognised that its long, narrow jaws with conical teeth differed from those of other large predators. He also suggested that the tall spines supported a sail-like structure or hump.

Bahariya produced other dinosaurs that Stromer described over the following years, including the sauropod Aegyptosaurus, the predator Bahariasaurus, and specimens he assigned in 1931 to Carcharodontosaurus. Together they revealed a rich Cretaceous ecosystem along a coastal plain with mangroves, rivers and estuaries, dating to roughly 100 to 94 million years ago.

Destruction in 1944

The Bahariya fossils were kept in the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Historical Geology, housed in the Alte Akademie building in central Munich. Stromer was an opponent of the Nazi regime, which damaged his career, and his relations with the collection’s director, Karl Beurlen, a committed Nazi, were poor.

As Allied air raids on German cities intensified during the Second World War, Stromer urged that the collection be moved to safety. His requests were not acted on. On the night of 24 to 25 April 1944, a Royal Air Force raid on Munich hit the building, and the Spinosaurus specimens were destroyed along with most of Stromer’s other Egyptian finds.

The war also struck Stromer personally. Two of his three sons were killed, and the third was held as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union until 1950. Stromer died in 1952, his life’s main collection lost, much as other wartime losses of irreplaceable fossils, such as the Peking Man bones in China, left scientists with only casts, notes and pictures.

Rediscovery and modern research

For more than half a century, scientists had little but Stromer’s 1915 publication and drawings. In the late 1990s and 2000s, interest revived. An American team re-explored Bahariya in 2000 and 2001, finding new dinosaurs, and its members later published photographs of the original Spinosaurus specimen found in Stromer’s archive, adding detail to the lost material. The story was told in the book The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt (2002).

New spinosaurid fossils from the Kem Kem beds of Morocco and other sites helped fill the gaps. In 2014 a team led by Nizar Ibrahim described a partial skeleton from Morocco and designated it as a new reference specimen (a neotype) for Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. They argued that the animal had short hind limbs, dense bones and other features suited to a semi-aquatic life. In 2020 the same group described a tail with tall spines forming a fin-like, paddle-shaped structure.

These conclusions have been debated. Some researchers question whether the Moroccan bones all belong to one animal or one species, while others, notably in a study led by Paul Sereno in 2022, argued that Spinosaurus was more likely a wading, shoreline hunter than an efficient swimmer. What most agree on is that it was a specialised predator that ate fish and lived close to water.

What kind of animal was Spinosaurus?

Spinosaurus belongs to the spinosaurids, a family of theropod dinosaurs with long, low skulls reminiscent of crocodiles. Relatives include Baryonyx, found in England in 1983, whose stomach contents included fish scales, and Suchomimus from Niger. These animals shared narrow snouts, cone-shaped teeth without strong serrations, and nostrils set well back on the skull, features suited to catching slippery prey such as fish.

Its back spines are the feature everyone remembers. They grew from the vertebrae of the back and, in life, were probably covered by skin to form a tall sail or, in some interpretations, a fleshy hump. The most widely favoured explanation is display, helping individuals recognise or impress one another. Older suggestions, such as controlling body temperature, are now considered less likely but cannot be ruled out.

The Cretaceous world of Spinosaurus was very different from today’s Sahara. Bahariya and the Kem Kem beds preserve river systems teeming with large fish, including lungfish, coelacanths and sawfish relatives, as well as crocodile-like reptiles and turtles. Several big predators lived side by side, which suggests they divided food resources, with Spinosaurus specialising in prey from the water.

Size and popular fame

Spinosaurus is often called the longest known predatory dinosaur. Many estimates put it at around 14 to 15 metres, longer than Tyrannosaurus rex, whose first skeleton was found in 1902. Because it was more lightly built, its weight is thought to have been similar to or less than that of the largest tyrannosaurs, and figures vary widely.

The dinosaur became a household name after the 2001 film Jurassic Park III, which showed it defeating a T. rex. That fight is fiction: the two animals lived on different continents and millions of years apart.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1911: Ernst Stromer visits the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert.
• 1912: Richard Markgraf excavates the Spinosaurus remains.
• 1915: Stromer names Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.
• 1944, 24–25 April: An Allied air raid on Munich destroys the original fossils.
• 1952: Ernst Stromer dies in Bavaria.
• 2000–2001: An American expedition returns to Bahariya.
• 2014: A Moroccan specimen is designated as a new reference specimen for Spinosaurus.
• 2020: A paddle-like tail is described from Morocco.

Why it matters

Spinosaurus shows both how much a single fossil can reveal and how fragile scientific heritage is in wartime. Stromer’s careful description preserved the essentials of a find that no longer exists, allowing later researchers to connect it with new discoveries. The ongoing debate about its lifestyle has also widened the picture of what dinosaurs could be, from land-bound giants to animals at home along rivers and shorelines.