Serrated Spinosaurus tooth from Kemkem

[Hunter0811]

Here is one of two serrated Spinosaurus teeth I recently acquired. Let me know what you think!

The tooth is from Kemkem and is about 3cm in lenght.

The serrations are very small, but still visible with the naked eye as I spotted this one on a fossil fair some time ago.

 

 

[Hunter0811]

the first two pictures are partly out of focus as I used a digital microscope, which has a very small depth of field. Sorry about that!

 

[LordTrilobite]

Nice tooth. I have a few myself. Though it's hard to make good photos of the small serrations. Serrated Spinosaurid teeth seem to be more rare than the ones with unserrated carinae. We still don't exactly know whether this is taxonomically significant though.

[Troodon]

Nice to see additional teeth with this morphology.  Hendrickx et al. in the most recent paper still describes this characteristic has unserrated and calls it beaded and sculptured a vestigial presence of small denticles, present in some Spinosaurinae. 

 

Nice teeth and like LordTrilobite said rare, nice acquisitions.

[Omnomosaurus]

I have a small, average looking Spino tooth in my collection that I flip-flop on as to whether it has some of these "vestigial" denticles or just really convincing wrinkles in places.

 

(The terrible quality of my photos doesn't do much to help either!)

 

I'm not sure how well it's coming across via photo, but the area where I have highlighted below has the most well defined looking denticles shapes going on:

 

[Troodon]

Nice, definitely "vestigial" denticles. What is cool is that it only appears on part of the carina.  Interesting how many are now popping up after years of searching.  Hopefully we will see more published on this feature 

[-Andy-]

Here's my contribution to serrated Spino

[Omnomosaurus]

6 hours ago, Troodon said:

Nice, definitely "vestigial" denticles. What is cool is that it only appears on part of the carina.  Interesting how many are now popping up after years of searching.  Hopefully we will see more published on this feature 

 

Ace! Guess I should show this tooth a little more love now.  I'm surprised at a few of these serrated Spino teeth popping up at once, since I've seen/heard very little about them.

 

I'm very curious as to whether they really do belong to a spinosaurid, or if there is a baryonychid (possibly Sigilmassasaurus?) somewhere in the assemblage.

 

The enamel texture of my small tooth is also very "veiny", much like example 'C' (Baryonyx), rather than the atomised texture of 'D', labelled as Spinosaurus sp.

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, -Andy- said:

Here's my contribution to serrated Spino

 

That one's a whopper!

[dinosaur man]

I found this on the internet looks more like a baryonychid then spinosaur but still not alot of evidance too prove its a baryonychid 

[Troodon]

Well Hendrickx et al. clearly state that the denticles 3 & 4 belong to a Spinosaurine see comment from paper so those are pretty strong supporting that case.  I dont plan to argue against it with the limited evidence in front of me.

 

".In Spinosaurinae, the carina is unserrated, yet it does not correspond to a smooth and regularly shape ridge. In lateral view, the carinae of Irritator (Figure 15.3) and Spinosaurus are ‘beaded’ and sculptured (Figure 15.4), respectively thus witnessing the vestigial presence of small denticles along the carinae. "

 

 

Their most recent comments on enamel it shows 1 & 2 has Baryonychine and 3 & 4 has Spinosaurine.  1 seems to work better on Andy's tooth but not others.  My serrated tooth looks like 4.

 

We know very little about these animals and don't even have agreement which ones are valid although most,  not all, say Sigilmassasaurus is and question Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.  Notice in the figure15 Hendrickx identifies Spinosaurus as cf aegyptiacus.  So lots of mixed evidence but not enough to say we have a baryonychine in the Kem Kem

[Omnomosaurus]

That's some excellent information I hadn't come across previously. It definitely scuppers my conspiracy theory. And if you're not willing to argue with any of it, then I'm certainly not haha!

 

I would say that Figure 25.1 does seem to have the closest enamel texture to my tooth too, rather than the pitted Spinosaurine in Figure 25.4. The Baryonychine denticles shown in Fig 15.1 are certainly not a match to any Kem Kem tooth I ever remember seeing (though Andy's doesn't look too far off), so that's another knock against my theory.

 

A wider look at my tooth (47mm including root):

 

 

Specific enamel textures and the presence of denticles are probably nowhere near as important to identification as I've been assuming with these morphologies.

 

I do find it quite interesting that we still only have a tentative grasp of the full nature of Spinosaurids in the Kem Kem, considering how synonymous they've become with the location.

[LordTrilobite]

18 hours ago, Omnomosaurus said:

 

Ace! Guess I should show this tooth a little more love now.  I'm surprised at a few of these serrated Spino teeth popping up at once, since I've seen/heard very little about them.

 

I'm very curious as to whether they really do belong to a spinosaurid, or if there is a baryonychid (possibly Sigilmassasaurus?) somewhere in the assemblage.

 

The enamel texture of my small tooth is also very "veiny", much like example 'C' (Baryonyx), rather than the atomised texture of 'D', labelled as Spinosaurus sp.

 

18 hours ago, dinosaur man said:

I found this on the internet looks more like a baryonychid then spinosaur but still not alot of evidance too prove its a baryonychid 

Only a few vertebrae are known for Sigilmassasaurus brevicollis. It's not known if it had a sail. So any image like this is mostly speculative.

 

Also note that baryonychid is not a thing.

Baryonyx and Suchomimus are both classified as Baryonychinae. Spinosaurus and Irritator are classified as Spinosaurinae.

All of these are placed in the family of Spinosauridae. This name can be shortened to Spinosaur.

So Baryonyx would be a Baryonychine Spinosaur. And Spinosaurus would be a Spinosaurine Spinosaur.

[Omnomosaurus]

2 hours ago, LordTrilobite said:

 

Only a few vertebrae are known for Sigilmassasaurus brevicollis. It's not known if it had a sail. So any image like this is mostly speculative.

 

Also note that baryonychid is not a thing.

Baryonyx and Suchomimus are both classified as Baryonychinae. Spinosaurus and Irritator are classified as Spinosaurinae.

All of these are placed in the family of Spinosauridae. This name can be shortened to Spinosaur.

So Baryonyx would be a Baryonychine Spinosaur. And Spinosaurus would be a Spinosaurine Spinosaur.

 

Thanks for that LordTrilobite!

 

My mistake on the terminologies there; I came across the (obviously incorrect) term "Baryonychidae" while initially reading around the subject, and ran with it. Will be sure to use the correct term in future though.

 

Seems there's a lot of speculative information around regarding these Spinosaurs.