Dave Hone: preference

Transcript context

…That’s powerful. …that’s incredibly powerful. So Spinosaurus or the spinosaurs as a whole is my go-to example for this are the guys with famous big sail back and the weird crocodile-like head, though some of them look rather different to that, and if you look across all the species and specimens that we have, incredibly fragmentary and very badly known, but they’re all basically associated with… When you look at the gestalt, you see a whole bunch of stuff for these things. So they do have a surprisingly crocodile-like head and crocodile-like teeth compared to every other carnivorous dinosaur, and when you do the mechanical analysis, you see they function in a very similar way. And indeed, teeth, here’s a spinosaur tooth with very nearly circular cross section, really distinctive, similar to crocodiles, similar to dolphins, similar to fish-eating fish, so points to fish. Crocodile-like head, points to fish. Crocs eat other stuff too, but still. They’re usually found in or near aquatic systems now. Fossils in general tend to turn up in aquatic systems because you’ve got to be buried to become a fossil, so water association is common, but even so that’s true. They turn up in places where lots of other dinosaurs don’t tend to turn up, including carnivores, which suggests they’re eating something else. If you look at the isotopic signature of the teeth, often it correlates with crocodiles, fish, turtles, and stuff that lives in water, and doesn’t correlate well with other land-living dinosaurs that lived in the same time and same place. So you put all of that together, and it’s really hard to argue… Oh, in addition to the tiny detail of Baryonyx, the British one was found with fish scales inside its chest cavity. So you put all of that together, and yeah, I’m not saying it only ate fish. I’m sure it ate big shrimp and turtles. And we know they were preying on terrestrial dinosaurs and pterosaurs because, again, stomach contents and teeth and stuff. But fundamentally, this is an animal or a group of animals doing something different to the other carnivorous dinosaurs, and it’s probably linked to water, and it’s probably linked to fish as a predominant way of living. We should mention that you’re working on a book o- out in early 2026?…

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