The Pharaoh’s Aquarium
In Middle Cretaceous North Africa, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the longest predator to walk the planet, has had his fill of fish, and relaxes in the swampy waters it lurks. While off its menu, the giant dinosaur serves as an ecological foundation for a menagerie of other aquatic life. Fish like Adrianaichthys and pterosaurs like Leptostomia feed on the Spinosaurus’s dead skin, scraps of meat on its teeth, parasites and that may hitch a ride. Gargantuan leeches latch on, drinking its blood, same with other large animals. The dinosaur’s dung is also plentiful in nitrogen-rich fish waste, fertilising the local aquatic flora in great importance, partly exploited by herbivores like Paranogmius, as well as the dung itself feeding potential coprophages. Predators such as sharks like Squalicorax, crocodilians like Aegisuchus and plesiosaurs like polycotylids will consume these animals in turn. Spinosaurus really is the pharaoh of the North African swamps, a keystone mutualist of its watery world, and not just its local apex predator.
On the topic of that ongoing debate, I don’t see why Spinosaurus couldn’t have just been semi-aquatic, and not just either a terrestrial wader or a fully-aquatic pursuit predator. One, we already know a good mix of terrestrial and aquatic adaptations from Spinosaurus that are self-explanatory. Two, both papers on either side have their pros and cons, for example, Ibrahim’s somehow giving Spinosaurus’s body a front-heavy chest that hasn’t been explained, and Sereno’s inflating Spinosaurus’s body, including the tail, and using a lower density than what is now generally accepted for dinosaurs in science. And three, it was an animal that could do anything doable it wished, not have to obligately do something in life, just like animals today. So Spinosaurus really is not the rabbit hole it’s overstated to be. The main topic of this artwork is Spinosaurus’s ecology, not just it being an apex predator terrorising fish, but also helping with their biotic community and ecology as a keystone species, a keystone mutualist you might say. I was inspired by today’s hippopotamuses, since they’re not only keystone species, but also ecosystem engineers that shape their watery habitat for good, similar to how I depicted Spinosaurus here. The positive interactions with fish and pterosaurs are also inspired by hippos’ relationships with fish and birds, such as oxpeckers. I would love to see more ecological paleoart like this. I also really wanted to do some beautiful aquatic scenery, because I’d always be bewildered looking at huge freshwater aquariums, with stuff like arapaimas. They’re almost like underwater gardens, so I wanted to do the same here, topped off with a biodiversity of animals Spinosaurus lived with. Also, I had to put in Squalicorax baharijensis and Asteracanthus aegyptiacus (the bigger species eating the crab) for Shark Week, although I’ve finished too late.
The main animals featured include the theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the giant coelacanth Mawsonia libyca, the sawskate (not a sawfish) Onchopristis numida, the "crocodilian" Aegisuchus witmeri, the pterosaurs Leptostomia begaaensis and Afrotapejara zouhri, the giant lungfish and bichir Neoceratodus africanus and Bawitius bartheli, the sharks Squalicorax baharijensis and Asteracanthus aegyptiacus, the large mysterious fish Paranogmius doederleini, the semionotid fish Adrianaichthys pankowskii, the bothremydid turtle Galianemys emringeri, indeterminate polycotylid plesiosaurs, some speculative giant leeches and some also-speculative Lurdusaurus-like iguanodont dinosaurs that I like to call "Taweretia enigma", based on a footprint from the Kem Kem Beds. There are also generic crabs, insects (including dragonflies), snails, small fish, and a frog.
Credit given to Joschua Knüppe for some inspiration with the reconstructions of the animals, as you can see on his Bahariya Formation chart.
