Spinosaurus Tail

Submission 29,861

Part of a series on Spinosaurus. [View Related Entries]

About

Spinosaurus Tail refers to reactions regarding the discovery of spinosaurus tail fossils in April 2020, revealing that it is the first known swimming dinosaur due to its paddle-like tail. Twitter users and Redditors responded to the finding with fan art, comparisons and general commentary.

Origin

On April 29th, 2020, Nature^[3] published the article "Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur" which announced a new discovery regarding the spinosaurus' tail. New fossils discovered suggests that the Spinosaurus has a paddle-like tail. That day, National Geographic tweeted a video of a possible rendering of what the spinosaurus could have looked like with the caption, "A newfound fossil tail is changing what we know about Spinosaurus--and stretching our understanding of how and where dinosaurs lived" (shown below). The video gained over 571,600 views and 16,500 likes in two days.

Spread

On April 29th, 2020, Twitter user @troodonvet^[5] responded to the news by posting a comedic image collage rendering of a spinosaurus captioned, "2020 #Spinosaurus in a nutshell" (shown below, left). The tweet garnered over 4,700 like and 1,00 retweets in two days. That same day, Twitter user @Foervraengd^[7] posted an image of Blathers from Animal Crossing with the caption, "Blathers when he checks the #spinosaurus tag and has to rearrange his fossil in the museum #acnh" (shown below, right). The tweet received over 4,500 likes in two days.

On April 29h, Twitter users continued to react to the news. Twitter user @y_naf^[4] posted an old drawing of a spinosaurus in the water which accumulated over 2,200 likes and 490 retweets (shown below, left). Twitter user @Reikkusu^[6] tweeted "The animal crossing spinosaurus skeleton is already inaccurate and I find that really funny" with a screenshot from the game (shown below, right). The tweet gained over 25,700 likes and 4,200 retweets in two days. Various news outlets like the Smithsonian mag^[1] published articles on the discovery. StayHipp^[2] published an article on the memes.

On April 30th, 2020, Redditor fwzain posted drawings of the fossils to r/Naturewasmetal^[8] and received over 3,600 points (99% upvoted) in a day (shown below, left). That same day, Redditor BattleUpSaber posted images comparing the spinosaurus to titanosauras to r/Godzilla^[9] and accumulated over 500 points (100% upvoted) in a day (shown below, right).