A blade of bone lay half-buried in Saharan sand, shaped like a scimitar and tall enough to confuse the people who picked it up. In November 2019, a 20-person team working in Niger collected that crest and a few jaw fragments from the desert surface. They did not grasp what they had at first. When they returned in 2022 and found two more crests, the pieces clicked into place. The fossils belonged to a new species of spinosaurid: Spinosaurus mirabilis, described in a paper in Science. The team was led by Paul Sereno, a professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. The discovery, the authors argue, adds a late chapter to spinosaurid evolution, and it comes from an inland basin rather than the nearshore settings that usually produce Spinosaurus fossils. Skull cast of the new scimitar-crested spinosaurid “Spinosaurus mirabilis.” (CREDIT: Keith Ladzinski) A crest built to be noticed The new dinosaur’s signature feature is a nasal-prefrontal crest that arches upward and backward, rising over the orbit. The paper describes it as …