Name: New dinosaur species discovered deep in the Sahara Desert
Uploaded: 2026-02-22T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 5 min 53 s
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Paleontologists have made a spine tingling find in the sands of the Sahara Desert -- a new species of dinosaur.

They've unearthed fossils of a super sized carnivore that lived over 95 million years ago.

The team now naming it Spinosaurus mirabilis, latin for astonishing.

The discovery raising as many questions as answers about prehistoric life.

And to answer some of those questions, I'm joined by Dr. Paul Serino,

paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic Explorer.

Dr. Serino, it is a pleasure to have you.

Okay, now you called this the expedition of the century.

Well, it was an extraordinary expedition.

Took a big chance to try and get into the heart of the Sahara by collecting together 20 young people that could take three months of their lives off,

and put together a big arm guard, sort of like our wild west and go into the middle of nowhere in the hopes of finding something.

And we were guaranteed nothing except that we had, you know, we'd been to the site,

found a tooth and a couple of jaw fragments and hours after we arrived we found that,

that what you're looking at is the crest on the top of the skull of this spinosaur.

We didn't know if we'd find a lot more of it, but we did.

Yeah, it was immediately apparent to us this was a new species because the crest is like nothing we've seen before on any predatory dinosaur.

I gotta know, what exactly do we know right now?

Yeah, it's become, through Jurassic Park, it's become the celebrated dinosaur because we don't have any in North America,

but in other parts, around the old Mediterranean Ocean, which we used to call a Tethys Ocean,

these dinosaurs stalked and now we're finding in the rivers, inland stalked fish.

And we were able to ferret out some of the great fish catching abilities of this animal by looking at its jaws.

And it was a, we call it a hell heron because I think it was wading into the waters,

but capable of just snatching a lot of large fish out of the riverways and the coastal region.

It's like nothing we've ever seen before.

Now this spinosaur, it differs from some of the other ones you actually studied.

Yeah, I'll just say, you know, this is what they share.

They share this kind of tooth that is straight, curved, no serrations, looks very different than a T. Rex tooth.

The original clues to this site I dug out of the library a French monograph.

You see my middle markings there gave us a sentence or two about a tooth.

But then we put together the pieces of the dinosaur.

As I walk behind it, it gives you a better idea of the size of this animal.

Its teeth interlock, the lower ones coming outside, the upper ones to snare a slippery fish.

If you ever tried to catch a fish with your hands, you'll know what I'm talking about.

This is a fishing adaptation only this dinosaur, Spinosaurus has.

The very low snout and then there's incredible crest that extends into the air with a covering.

And I'm going to give you just a shot of the covering that we've reconstructed for it.

It would have a covering like a live animal in keratin, that would extend it a little bit further.

And so that gives us a couple of clues about this dinosaur, one of which is that it's a land animal.

It's inhabiting the margins of oceans, the margins of riverways.

It is not a diving marine Loch Ness monster as some have proposed.

This is sort of the coup de grace for that idea.

This animal I wouldn't want to be anywhere near.

If I was near the shore or on land, it could probably grab anything.

But it was primarily adapted in a way we've never seen for eating fish.

We're actually going to name a 12 foot superfish that we found not far from the dinosaur.

I mean, just to see the teeth as big as your palm is startling to imagine this dinosaur.

Now, do you think you'll find more dinosaurs in more remote regions or do you think this is a one off finding?

So for your listeners, first of all, we're in the age of discovery.

We're naming more dinosaurs now than we've ever named before.

So your kids and their kids, they're going to be in the heyday of dinosaur research.

But not only can I tell you, we're going to find more, we are going to name a lot more from that site.

There are digging raptors you've never seen,

there are crocodiles and all sorts of creatures that we have already found in the 50 tons we took from Africa on that legendary expedition.

In fact, it really is a lost world we're going to describe.

We've known about T. Rex, Triceratops, the Duck bills,

for a century here in North America because we have excellent beds and because people have been going there for more than a century.

We went to the center of the Sahara and found Africa's lost world.

It is the last continent you're going to be able to describe.

Immense creatures by the dozen to give us some idea of what was inhabiting that world.

We cannot wait and see the discoveries you, your team,

and other paleontologists around the world uncover for all of us.