How many of you are scared by the thought of visiting a dentist? I will be honest, I do get sweaty hands by thinking about those whirring tool and tweezers. However, dentists do care about our teeth and its also true that our teeth do reveal a lot about us.
Over millions of years in the fossil record, teeth provide deep insights into the evolution of a species which are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through other sources of fossil or archaeological data.
In the month of September in 2020, a group of researchers from the University of Portsmouth made a discovery of 1200 dinosaur teeth, and after their study came to the conclusion that Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus was actually a river-monster. The massive predator dino became popular due to the movie Jurassic Park 3, but sadly the movie got this major fact wrong about it.
Spinosaurus, a 15 metre long, 15000 Kg beast was the most commonly found creature in the Kem Kem river system, which flowed through the Sahara Desert 100 million years ago. Till very recently, everyone used to believe that this giant used to live only on land. But the researchers opined that it was actually quite well-versed with aquatic lifestyle, and was a bipedal dino that uses to eat fish from the shore lines. They came to this conclusion due to its newly discovered tail. What’s more they found over thousand Spinosaurus teeth from the site of an ancient river bed in Morocco.
The Kem Kem river beds have also been the source of remains of many other Cretaceous creatures including sawfish, coelacanths, crocodiles, flying reptiles and other land-living dinosaurs that were eaten by this majestic shoreline predator.
