In a discovery that punctures a century-long lull, an international team sifting through the wind-scoured fossil beds of Niger's Sahara has christened an arresting new species of Spinosaurus, the first fresh addition to this enigmatic clade in more than a hundred years.
The animal was a formidable, semi-aquatic predator whose entire ecology appears to have pivoted on the pursuit of fish through sprawling prehistoric river networks.
Setting it apart is an extravagant, sabre-shaped crest that curves back from the cranium, a bony flourish without obvious parallel among its kin and one whose function remains tantalisingly ambiguous.
So theatrical is this silhouette that the team dubbed the creature the "hell heron", invoking the spectral menace of the wading birds that haunt today's shallows.
By interrogating the fine architecture of the skeleton, palaeontologists can begin to model its buoyancy, locomotion and predatory mechanics along vanished shorelines.
The specimen lends fresh weight to the increasingly robust argument that a swathe of giant theropods were intimately bound to aquatic realms rather than confined to dry land.
Above all, it is a bracing reminder that even the most scrutinised lineages can still surrender profound revelations from the planet's most forbidding and least-trodden terrain.