Sertanejo from Ceará had a bone from a Brazilian swimming dino at home

The piece of a tibia (shin bone) belonged to a spinosaurus, a carnivorous dino that is a distant relative of prehistoric apex predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex. The bone characteristics of the fragment indicate that it functioned as a type of ballast, helping the animal to sink in the waters where it fished, in the region where the Araripe plateau is today. "When I realized how dense the bone was, my blood pressure even dropped, because it looked like it was from a spinosaurus," paleontologist Tito Aureliano, from Unicamp and UFSCar (Federal University of São Carlos).