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“The animal we are resurrecting is so bizarre, it’s going to force dinosaur experts to rethink many things,” said Nizar Ibrahim, a researcher at the University of Chicago who helped discover Spinosaurus, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.

Spinosaurus was 2.7 metres longer than the biggest known Tyrannosaurus rex, and probably used its claws to slice open sharks and sawfish for meals, the scientists said.

Along with his colleagues, Ibrahim found the Spinosaurus bones in the southeastern Kem Kem region of Morocco. The researchers made inferences about its lifestyle by comparing it with notes from Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach, the scientist who first discovered fragments of the species at the turn of the 20th century and called it “spine reptile.”

Spinosaurus may be the only dinosaur that spent substantial time hunting and living in water, unlike the land beasts dinosaurs were thought to be, according to the report. It probably had webbed feet and a sail on its back that breached the surface while it moved through rivers and lakes.

Its ability to swim well enough to catch its prey, including armoured, razor-nosed fish that grew as large as buses and the first sharks, likely made Spinosaurus slower on land, Ibrahim said. On land, the dinosaur probably lumbered on all fours, dragging its 50-foot-long body across the ground no faster than a sloth.

“One of the things we are really interested in is how exactly this animal moved,” Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and study co-author said. “It’s like working on an extraterrestrial, a very strange creature.”