THE SPINOSAURUS PUMP COVER

Spinosaurus was first described in 1915, from fossils dug out of the Egyptian desert. It didn't last — the only skeleton in existence was destroyed in a WWII bombing raid on Munich in 1944. All that survived were some notes, photos, and drawings.

That's what paleontologists had to work with for the next seventy years. Spinosaurus kept getting rebuilt as A STANDARD LAND PREDATORAN ANIMAL BUILT TO SWIM, over and over, until new fossils turned up decades later and forced an actual rethink — short back legs, dense bones, a paddle tail. This thing lived in the water.

It's one of the only dinosaurs ever reconstructed almost entirely from memory of a fossil that doesn't exist anymore, and one of the only ones that got completely rebuilt once real bones finally showed up again.