Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
An examination of some newly obtained fossils shows that Spinosaurus stretched an impressive 17 metres from nose to tail, dwarfing its meat-eating relatives. As well as being longer than its rivals, Spinosaurus also had stronger arms with which to catch its prey, unlike the puny-armed T. rex and its ilk.Until 10 years ago, T. rex held the mantle of the biggest predatory dinosaur. Of the 30 specimens collected so far, the largest and most complete is a fossil called Sue, kept at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She measures 12.8 metres long and is thought to have weighed 6.4 tonnes when alive 67 million years ago.
Enter Gigantosaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now Argentina. Reconstruction of a partial skeleton indicated that it stretched 13.7 metres. It lived about 100 million years ago at around the same time as two other huge predatory dinosaurs were stalking other continents. The slightly smaller Carcharodontosaurus lived in Africa while Acanthosaurus lived in North America, the only one of the three dinosaurs for which we have more than a handful of fragmentary fossils. All three predators were closely related to Allosaurus, a 9 to 12-metre-long predator of a lighter build than T. rex which was common in North America 150 million years ago.
Although there is some reason for skepticism about the measurment:
But a new examination of two skull fragments of Spinosaurus has confirmed its early reputation. Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Civic Natural History Museum in Milan, Italy, and his colleagues analysed a snout the museum acquired from an Italian collector, and previously unidentified bones from the upper rear of the skull collected by the University of Chicago, both of which were originally unearthed in Morocco.After measuring their sizes, he estimates that the 99-centimetre-long snout came from a skull 1.75 metres long. From what we know of the body shapes of other spinosaurs, Dal Sasso calculates that the new Spinosaurus was 17 metres long and weighed 7 to 9 tonnes (Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol 14, p 888).
Comments
Holy. Cow.
Posted by: Mark Paris
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February 13, 2006 1:22 PM
Thanks for the post afarensis. But, I have a question -
What good is catching prey with fore limbs if the mouth can't reach them? Or maybe Spinosaurus had a more flexible neck than appears? If the proportions were as shown, I would think the use of fore limbs would be more like a prop to maintain balance if the head is low to or at the ground.
Posted by: deb | February 13, 2006 2:00 PM
I would think that the neck is more flexible than it appears...
Posted by: afarensis | February 13, 2006 3:19 PM
If the silhouettes are correct, it still looks to me like T-rex has the deepest and most powerful head with (perhaps) the best weaponry. None of them look like fun in a dark alley or anywhere else.
Posted by: Carl Buell(OGeorge) | February 13, 2006 6:29 PM
I am sure Spino managed somehow! I see other Spino illustrations (perhaps over Hollywood-ed) show rather different proportions. I enjoy observing wildlife and learning about habitat development. It would be like winning the lottery to be able to time travel to various epochs just to observe what was alive at the time. I would gladly settle for the beginning of the last ice age recession even.
Do you get involved much with pre-European environment/habitat/ecology in the Missouri Arch. Soc.? Although it is Central New England based, Tom Wessels' 1997 book 'Reading the Forested Landscape' has some good stuff in it describing the pre-colonial coastal New England forest and how it was apparently managed by the existing native populations.
Posted by: deb | February 13, 2006 7:53 PM
Carl - I wouldn't want to come face to face with any of them either. The article did mention that T-Rex had, by far, the most lethal eating equipment...
Deb - I just joined about a month ago so I haven't been too involved, yet. Speaking of Pre-European landscapes...interesting stuff
Posted by: afarensis | February 13, 2006 8:23 PM
Thanks for the link to the California study. I will spend some time there for sure.
The gist of Wessels' writing about pre-european New England is that the natives practised controlled burning to promote a forested landscape which provided for them. Blueberries and huckleberries benefited. (Even now, blueberry fields are burned every 2-3 years to promote new growth.) The burning also set up ideal conditions for fire resistent trees like American Chestnut, white oak and shagbark hickory - all producers of nuts (acorn flour in the case of oaks) eaten by humans and mast for deer and turkey. Getting rid of the underbrush and brambles also made hunting and travel far easier with the added benefit of reducing mosquito and black fly populations. These two insects can make New England a hellish place in certain seasons. We call Deep Woods Off - Eau de Maine.
It is said that along the coast in the Boston area, the nearest dense stand of trees was 6 miles inland - due to native management of tidal marshes. That is amazing.
Posted by: deb | February 13, 2006 9:01 PM
Sounds like some of the same kind of thing they were doing here in Missouri - controlled burning to create friendly environments for buffalo and what not...
Posted by: afarensis | February 13, 2006 10:24 PM
Hello afarensis, there are two dinosaurs described in the the book of Job. The first Behemoth is easy to identify as a kind of bracheosauridae. The second is a little more difficult because of the variety of carnivores of a very large size. Because this creature seemed to like water a lot, I tend to believe that it was a Spinosaurus. I was wondering if you had any ideas about this creature that is described in Job 41. The other one which is a plant eater is described in Job 40. Thanks!
Posted by: Daleri | February 21, 2008 3:38 AM
In that dinosaurs went extinct a good 65 million years before the bible was written, I am skeptical at such attempts at identification.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | February 21, 2008 7:55 AM
I don't believe that is a valid date for the age of dinosaurs. Perhaps someone can explain how all of these creatures got covered with dirt?
Posted by: Daleri | February 22, 2008 1:07 PM
The mass of evidence is against you on that score, whether you choose to accept it or not, dinosaurs went extinct 65 MYA. Bear in mind you are reading a translation of the bible, one subject to the preconceptions of the translator. At any rate, to answer your question, the process of fossilization is weel understood.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | February 22, 2008 6:27 PM
afarensis, thanks for your responses. I was wondering if you had any idea of which creatures are described in Job 40 and 41 (without looking at the footnotes). Anyone can verify the translations and they have been verified many times through the years. It is pretty much saying what we understand it to say today. I will look up your references when I get a chance later.
Posted by: Daleri | February 23, 2008 3:02 PM
The equation of dinosaurs with mythological beasts in the bible is pretty much a modern phenomena and comes largely from creationist literature (from folks like Hovind and Morris). I, personally, am not aware of any serious biblical scholarship that would support such a contention. Having said that, it is possible that the writers of the book of Job were familiar with large fossils from the area and created mythical beasts to explain them (see here and here for examples).
While you are checking out those links, you may want to check some of these links out has well and this one and this one.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | February 23, 2008 3:41 PM
Apparently (according to the historical record), Leviathan was still living when the Psalms were written. I saw a place where "heads" was used in one of the accounts in the Psalms but I did not see "seven heads". "Seven heads" is used in the book of Revelation which is more symbolic but it is still referring to a creature that actually lived in the sea (which did not have seven heads). Spinosaurus is one of the few creatures that matches the description of "serpent", "dragon" and "sea monster" because of the long tail and snakelike head and neck. Spinosaurus is one of the more serpent like creatures ever found that has the kind of huge sise described in the book of Job and we still have the Behemoth plant eater to explain which had a tail like a cedar. No plant eater today has a tail like a cedar.
Posted by: Daleri | February 25, 2008 10:01 PM
Any number of beasts fit the description of "serpent", "dragon", or "sea monster". Some were real but most were mythological. When you say leviathan was still alive according to "the historical record" what historical record were you referring too? I ask because the only piece of literature I am familiar with that mentions Leviathan is a religious document written for religious reasons to lay out a religious view of the world and as such is subject to quite a bit of historical inaccuracy. I think you are trying to project modern understandings of the diversity of life into a mythological setting, in much the same way that the ancient Greeks interpreted fossil material as mythological beings such as the cyclops or the griffin. At any rate, presumably if dinosaurs did exist at the time of Job there should be dinosaur fossils dating to that time period. There are none.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | February 26, 2008 12:00 AM
To assume the Bible is inaccurate is a big mistake. The Bible has been proven to be very accurate historically many times over. Not only do we have a vivid description of two animals we know are not living today, we have two fossils that fit both vivid descriptions of the two animals that we would otherwise know nothing about. Let's face it, Spinosaurus was a real living sea monster. The Bible happens to describe a sea monster just like that. Just because there is no dated fossil 4000 or 5000 years old does not mean the animal did not exist back then. Brachiosauridae is a family of dinosaurs that very much resembles Behemoth also described in the Bible. We have two dinosaurs in one Bible to account for.
Posted by: Daleri | February 26, 2008 1:14 AM
The historical accuracy of the bible is certainly a debatable proposition. However, for the sake of argument let's assume is is fairly accurate. The problem is, in order for two separate species to survive the cataclysmic aftermath of the asteroid impact that killed off all the other dinosaurs and make it to the Holocene, there would have to be two fairly large populations (or at least populations large enough to avoid the deleterious impact of inbreeding) that survived for something like 65 million years (which requires an explanation). No other source but the bible recounts these two beasts, so they would have had to have been fairly isolated from all but the people in the book of Job (who, in all probability was actually a mythological figure and not a real person, according to most reputable biblical scholars). Of course we see nothing of them in the fossil record so that needs to be explained as well. This is a quite extraordinary claim and requires an extraordinary level of proof.
In reality the description in the bible is so vague that they have been identified as everything from a hippo (most biblical scholars interpret the word leviathan to mean hippo) to a whale.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | February 26, 2008 7:23 PM
As somewhat of an amateur linguist, the word "whale" could be loosely translated as "sea creature". (The hippo and the elephant are very poor comparisons to the other plant eating dinosaur) In all fairness to the skeptics though, we do not have a positive ID on either one of the creatures. We only have a general description of the creatures that are being described, but there is much more information given in the simple description than palaeontologists have been able to provide us for any similar creatures. The rows of scales on its back and belly are described. The folds of skin are described. Various details of the way that it walks, its strength, its grace was described even how it raises itself up. Its eyes and teeth are described and the strength of its neck. The tremendous size and scale is described and how the sea is churned up and bubbles up when it enters the water. Even the wake that it leaves behind is described. Yet there is only one creature that could fit this kind of description. Spinosaurus is the closest creature that we know of and Spinosaurus could easily be described as a sea serpent, sea monster or dragon. It is the only information that we have and it fits.
Posted by: Daleri | February 27, 2008 8:44 AM