Credit: Daniel NavarroResearchers think they have actually discovered important defects in the research studies promoting for aquatic hunting behavior in Spinosaurus.Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures, United States, and his team recommend in a study just recently released in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, that the theory supporting the water searching habits of Spinosaurus might have fundamental flaws.Paleontologists typically agree that the popular Spinosaurus was a fish-eater, however precisely how these dinosaurs caught their prey is the topic of vibrant dispute, with some researchers suggesting that they hunted on the shore, some that they waded or swam in the shallows, and others that they were aquatic pursuit predators.One current study offered assistance for the latter hypothesis using a fairly brand-new statistical technique called phylogenetic versatile discriminant analysis (pFDA) to examine the density and percentages of spinosaur bones. In the present study, Myhrvold and associates seriously assess the approaches of that previous research study and recognize substantial flaws.The Spinosaurus thigh bone (left) was thin sectioned with a diamond saw (middle) to expose under zoom its bone structure (right). Myhrvold and coworkers think that there are enough problems with this methodology to revoke the findings of the previous research.Methodological Flaws and RecommendationsThis brand-new research study does not intend to settle the argument over the way of life of spinosaurid dinosaurs, however it does refute the conclusions of the previous paper which supported the aquatic pursuit predator hypothesis, a concept which the authors note is also opposed by a number of other research studies.
