title: Richard Linklater

text: While gaining a cult following in the independent film world, he made his third film, "Dazed and Confused", based on his years at Huntsville High School and the people he encountered there. The film garnered critical praise and grossed $8 million in the United States while becoming a hit on VHS. This film was also responsible for the breakout of fellow Texas native Matthew McConaughey.


title: Richard Linklater

text: In 1995, Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director for the film "Before Sunrise" at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival. His next feature, "subUrbia", had mixed reviews critically, and did very poorly at the box office. In 1998, he took on his first Hollywood feature, "The Newton Boys", which received mixed reviews while tanking at the box office.


title: Richard Linklater

text: With the rotoscope films "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly", and his mainstream comedies, "School of Rock" and the remake of "Bad News Bears", he gained wider recognition.


title: Richard Linklater

text: In 2003, he wrote and directed a pilot for HBO with Rodney Rothman called "$5.15/hr", about several minimum wage restaurant workers. The pilot deals with themes later examined in "Fast Food Nation".


title: Richard Linklater

text: The British television network Channel 4 produced a documentary about Linklater, in which the filmmaker discussed the personal and philosophical ideas behind his films. "St Richard of Austin" was presented by Ben Lewis and directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004 in the UK.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film "Before Sunset".


title: Richard Linklater

text: "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly" both used rotoscoping animation techniques. Working with Bob Sabiston and Sabiston's program Rotoshop to create this effect, Linklater shot and edited both movies completely as live-action features, then employed a team of artists to "trace over" individual frames. The result is a distinctive "semi-real" quality, praised by such critics as Roger Ebert (in the case of "Waking Life") as being original and well-suited to the aims of the film.


title: Richard Linklater

text: "Fast Food Nation" (2006) is an adaptation of the best selling book that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry. The film was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before being released in North America on November 17, 2006 and in Europe on March 23, 2007. The film received mixed reviews.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater fared better with the critics with "A Scanner Darkly" (released in the same year), "Me and Orson Welles" (2009), and "Bernie" (2011).


title: Richard Linklater

text: He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for "Before Midnight", the third film in the "Before..." trilogy.


title: Richard Linklater

text: In 2014 he released the film "Boyhood", which had been 12 years in the making. "Boyhood" received overwhelming critical acclaim. Linklater won the Golden Globes, Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and BAFTAs for Best Director and Best Picture. He also received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director, along with nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture.


title: Richard Linklater

text: For a while Linklater was attached to direct a remake of "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" for Warner Bros. However, he dropped the project in favor of working on a spiritual successor to "Dazed and Confused", titled "Everybody Wants Some!!", with backing from Annapurna Pictures and Paramount distributing the film in North America. The film was released in March 2016 and was well received by critics, but it failed to recoup its budget of 10 million dollars, grossing only 4.6 million.


title: Richard Linklater

text: In the second half of the 2010s, Linklater wrote and directed the drama film "Last Flag Flying", starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve Carell. A sequel to Hal Ashby's 1973 film "The Last Detail", it began filming in November 2016, and was released on November 3, 2017. Linklater then directed "Where'd You Go, Bernadette", based on the novel by Maria Semple and produced by Annapurna Pictures.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater was attached to direct an adaptation of Graeme Simsion's novel "The Rosie Project" that would have starred Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role, but he dropped out of directing when Lawrence dropped out of the project.


title: Richard Linklater

text: In 2019, it was announced that Linklater would be filming an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical "Merrily We Roll Along". Like "Boyhood", it will be filmed over the course of several years, but, like the musical and the play it is based on, will be presented in reverse chronology.


title: Richard Linklater

text: It made me see movies as a potential outlet for what I was thinking about and hoping to express. At that point I was an unformed artist. At that moment, something was simmering in me, but "Raging Bull" brought it to a boil.


title: Richard Linklater

text: He was also influenced by Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Josef Von Sternberg, and Carl Theodor Dreyer.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Many of Linklater's films, including "Slacker", "Dazed and Confused", "Tape", and all three installments of the "Before Trilogy", take place in a single day. They are less plot driven and more about human interactions.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Ethan Hawke and Matthew McConaughey have appeared in many of his films. Other actors who have appeared in more than one film include Jack Black, Julie Delpy, Ellar Coltrane, Blake Jenner, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey, Glen Powell, Rory Cochrane, Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette, and Laurence Fishburne.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater lives in Austin, Texas and refuses to live or work in Hollywood for any extended period of time.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater has been partnered with Christina Harrison since the 1990s. In 1994 they had a daughter, and twin girls in 2004. The oldest, Lorelei Linklater, co-starred in "Boyhood" as the sister of the main character.


title: Richard Linklater

text: Linklater has been a vegetarian since his early 20s. In 2015, he explained the dietary lifestyle in a "Boyhood"-style documentary for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Spinosaurus (; ) is a genus of spinosaurid dinosaur that lived in what now is North Africa during the Cenomanian to upper Turonian stages of the Late Cretaceous period, about 99 to 93.5 million years ago. The genus was known first from Egyptian remains discovered in 1912 and described by German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer in 1915. The original remains were destroyed in World War II, but additional material came to light in the early 21st century. It is unclear whether one or two species are represented in the fossils reported in the scientific literature. The best known species is S. aegyptiacus from Egypt, although a potential second species, S. maroccanus, has been recovered from Morocco. The contemporary spinosaurid genus "Sigilmassasaurus" has also been synonymized by some authors with "S. aegyptiacus", though other researchers propose it to be a distinct taxon. Another possible junior synonym is "Oxalaia" from the Alcântara Formation in Brazil.


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" is the longest known terrestrial carnivore; other large carnivores comparable to "Spinosaurus" include theropods such as "Tyrannosaurus", "Giganotosaurus" and "Carcharodontosaurus". The most recent study suggests that previous body size estimates are overestimated, and that "S. aegyptiacus" reached in length and in body mass. The skull of "Spinosaurus" was long, low, and narrow, similar to that of a modern crocodilian, and bore straight conical teeth with no serrations. It would have had large, robust forelimbs bearing three-fingered hands, with an enlarged claw on the first digit. The distinctive neural spines of "Spinosaurus", which were long extensions of the vertebrae (or backbones), grew to at least long and were likely to have had skin connecting them, forming a sail-like structure, although some authors have suggested that the spines were covered in fat and formed a hump. The hip bones of "Spinosaurus" were reduced, and the legs were very short in proportion to the body. Its long and narrow tail was deepened by tall, thin neural spines and elongated chevrons, forming a flexible fin or paddle-like structure.


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" is known to have eaten fish, and most scientists believe that it hunted both terrestrial and aquatic prey. Evidence suggests that it was highly semiaquatic, and lived both on land and in water much like modern crocodilians do. "Spinosaurus"'s leg bones had osteosclerosis (high bone density), allowing for better buoyancy control, and the paddle-like tail was likely used for underwater propulsion. Multiple functions have been put forward for the dorsal sail, including thermoregulation and display; either to intimidate rivals or attract mates. It lived in a humid environment of tidal flats and mangrove forests alongside many other dinosaurs, as well as fish, crocodylomorphs, lizards, turtles, pterosaurs, and plesiosaurs.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Two species of "Spinosaurus" have been named: "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" (meaning "Egyptian spine lizard") and the disputed "Spinosaurus maroccanus" (meaning "Moroccan spine lizard"). The first described remains of "Spinosaurus" were found and described in the early 20th century. In 1912, Richard Markgraf discovered a partial skeleton of a giant theropod dinosaur in the Bahariya Formation of western Egypt. In 1915, German paleontologist Ernst Stromer published an article assigning the specimen to a new genus and species, "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: Fragmentary additional remains from Bahariya, including vertebrae and hindlimb bones, were designated by Stromer as ""Spinosaurus B"" in 1934. Stromer considered them different enough to belong to another species, and this has been borne out. With the advantage of more expeditions and material, it appears that they pertain either to "Carcharodontosaurus" or to "Sigilmassasaurus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: "S. maroccanus" was originally described by Dale Russell in 1996 as a new species based on the length of its neck vertebrae. Specifically, Russell claimed that the ratio of the length of the centrum (body of vertebra) to the height of the posterior articular facet was 1.1 in "S. aegyptiacus" and 1.5 in "S. maroccanus". Later authors have been split on this topic. Some authors note that the length of the vertebrae can vary from individual to individual, that the holotype specimen was destroyed and thus cannot be compared directly with the "S. maroccanus" specimen, and that it is unknown which cervical vertebrae the "S. maroccanus" specimens represent. Therefore, though some have retained the species as valid without much comment, most researchers regard "S. maroccanus" as a "nomen dubium" (dubious name) or as a junior synonym of "S. aegyptiacus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: Six main partial specimens of "Spinosaurus" have been described. BSP 1912 VIII 19, described by Stromer in 1915 from the Bahariya Formation, was the holotype. The material consisted of the following items, most of which were incomplete: right and left dentaries and splenials from the lower jaw measuring long; a straight piece of the left maxilla that was described but not drawn; 20 teeth; 2 cervical vertebrae; 7 dorsal (trunk) vertebrae; 3 sacral vertebrae; 1 caudal vertebra; 4 thoracic ribs; and gastralia. Of the nine neural spines whose heights are given, the longest ("i," associated with a dorsal vertebra) was in length. Stromer claimed that the specimen was from the early Cenomanian, about 97 million years ago.


title: Spinosaurus

text: It was destroyed in World War II, specifically "during the night of 24/25 April 1944 in a British bombing raid of Munich" that severely damaged the building housing the Paläontologisches Museum München (Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology). However, detailed drawings and descriptions of the specimen remain. Stromer's son donated Stromer's archives to the Paläontologische Staatssammlung München in 1995, and Smith and colleagues analysed two photographs of the "Spinosaurus" holotype specimen BSP 1912 VIII 19 discovered in the archives in 2000. On the basis of a photograph of the lower jaw and a photograph of the entire specimen as mounted, Smith concluded that Stromer's original 1915 drawings were slightly inaccurate. In 2003, Oliver Rauhut suggested that Stromer's "Spinosaurus" holotype was a chimera, composed of vertebrae and neural spines from a carcharodontosaurid similar to "Acrocanthosaurus" and a dentary from "Baryonyx" or "Suchomimus". The analysis was rejected in at least one subsequent paper.


title: Spinosaurus

text: NMC 50791, held by the Canadian Museum of Nature, is a mid-cervical vertebra which is long from the Kem Kem Beds of Morocco. It is the holotype of "Spinosaurus maroccanus," as described by Russell in 1996. Other specimens referred to "S. maroccanus" in the same paper were two other mid-cervical vertebrae (NMC 41768 and NMC 50790), an anterior dentary fragment (NMC 50832), a mid-dentary fragment (NMC 50833), and an anterior dorsal neural arch (NMC 50813). Russell stated that "only general locality information could be provided" for the specimen, and therefore it could be dated only "possibly" to the Albian.


title: Spinosaurus

text: MNHN SAM 124, housed at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, is a snout (consisting of partial premaxillae, partial maxillae, vomers, and a dentary fragment). Described by Taquet and Russell in 1998, the specimen is in width; no length was stated. The specimen was located in Algeria, and "is of Albian age." Taquet and Russell believed that the specimen, along with a premaxilla fragment (SAM 125), two cervical vertebrae (SAM 126–127), and a dorsal neural arch (SAM 128), belonged to "S. maroccanus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: BM231 (in the collection of the Office National des Mines, Tunis) was described by Buffetaut and Ouaja in 2002. It consists of a partial anterior dentary in length from an early Albian stratum of the Chenini Formation of Tunisia. The dentary fragment, which included four alveoli and two partial teeth, was "extremely similar" to existing material of "S. aegyptiacus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: UCPC-2 in the University of Chicago Paleontological Collection consists mainly of two narrow connected nasals with a fluted (ridged) crest from the region between the eyes. The specimen, which is long, was located in an early Cenomanian part of the Moroccan Kem Kem Beds in 1996 and described in the scientific literature in 2005 by Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Civic Natural History Museum in Milan and colleagues.


title: Spinosaurus

text: MSNM V4047 (in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano), described by Dal Sasso and colleagues in 2005, consists of a snout (premaxillae, partial maxillae, and partial nasals) long from the Kem Kem Beds. Like UCPC-2, it is thought to have come from the early Cenomanian. Arden and colleagues in 2018 tentatively assigned this specimen to "Sigilmassasaurus brevicollis" given its size. However, this assignment was later rejected by other researchers who considered the uniqueness of this specimen to be based on misinterpretations and poor preservation of another specimen, NHMUK R16665, another snout stored that is stored in the Natural History Museum, London.


title: Spinosaurus

text: FSAC-KK 11888 is a partial subadult skeleton recovered from the Kem Kem beds of North Africa. Described by Ibrahim and colleagues (2014) and designated as the neotype specimen (although Evers and colleagues 2015 reject the neotype designation for FSAC-KK-11888). It includes cervical vertebrae, dorsal vertebrae, neural spines, a complete sacrum, femora, tibiae, pedal phalanges, caudal vertebra, several dorsal ribs, and fragments of the skull. The body proportions of the specimen have been debated, as the hind limbs are disproportionately shorter in the specimen than in previous reconstructions. However, it has been demonstrated by multiple paleontologists that the specimen is not a chimera, and is indeed a specimen of "Spinosaurus" that suggests that the animal had much smaller hind limbs than previously thought.


title: Spinosaurus

text: MHNM.KK374 to .KK378 are five isolated quadrates (skull bones) of different sizes that were collected by locals and acquired commercially in


title: Spinosaurus

text: the Kem Kem region of southeastern Morocco, provided by François Escuillié and are deposited in the collections of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle of Marrakech. The quadrates show two different morphologies, suggesting the existence of two spinosaurines in Morocco. However, a 2020 study on variation within "Spinosaurus" considers these differences in morphology to be indicative of variation in skull morphology within a single species, as is the case in "Allosaurus."


title: Spinosaurus

text: Some scientists have considered the genus "Sigilmassasaurus" a junior synonym of "Spinosaurus". In Ibrahim and colleagues (2014), the specimens of "Sigilmassasaurus" was referred to "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" together with "Spinosaurus B" as the neotype and "Spinosaurus maroccanus" was considered as a "nomen dubium" following the conclusions of the other papers. A 2015 re-description of "Sigilmassasaurus" disputed these conclusions, and considered the genus valid. This conclusion was further supported in 2018 by Arden and colleagues, who consider "Sigilmassasaurus" to be a distinct genus, though a very close relative of "Spinosaurus", the two unified in the tribe Spinosaurini, coined in the study.


title: Spinosaurus

text: In a 2020 paper written by Symth "et al." in assessing spinosaurine specimens from the Kem Kem Group suggested the Brazilian spinosaurine "Oxalaia" to be a potential junior synonym of "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus". This was based on looking at the specimens assigned to "Oxalaia", and the supposed autapomorphies of this taxon to be insignificant and fall within the hypodigm of "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus". If supported by future studies, this would imply "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" had a wider distribution and supports the faunal exchange between South America and Africa during this time. Additionally, the study further indicates synonymy between "Spinosaurus" and "Sigilmassasaurus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: Since its discovery, "Spinosaurus" has been a contender for the longest and largest theropod dinosaur. Both Friedrich von Huene in 1926 and Donald F. Glut in 1982 listed it as among the most massive theropods in their surveys, at in length and upwards of in weight. In 1988, Gregory S. Paul also listed it as the longest theropod at , but gave a lower mass estimate of .


title: Spinosaurus

text: In 2005, Dal Sasso and colleagues assumed that "Spinosaurus" and the spinosaurid "Suchomimus" had the same body proportions in relation to their skull lengths, and thereby calculated that "Spinosaurus" was in length and in weight. The estimates were criticized because the skull length estimate was uncertain, and (assuming that body mass increases as the cube of body length) scaling "Suchomimus," which was long and in mass, to the range of estimated lengths of "Spinosaurus" would produce an estimated body mass of .


title: Spinosaurus

text: François Therrien and Donald Henderson, in a 2007 paper using scaling based on skull length, challenged previous estimates of the size of "Spinosaurus", finding the length too great and the weight too small. Based on estimated skull lengths of , their estimates include a body length of and a body mass of . The lower estimates for "Spinosaurus" would imply that the animal was shorter and lighter than "Carcharodontosaurus" and "Giganotosaurus". The Therrien and Henderson study has been criticized for the choice of theropods used for comparison (e.g., most of the theropods used to set the initial equations were tyrannosaurids and carnosaurs, which have a different build than spinosaurids), and for the assumption that the "Spinosaurus" skull could be as little as in length.


title: Spinosaurus

text: In 2014, Ibrahim and his colleagues suggested that "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" could reach over in length. In 2022, however, Paul Sereno and his colleagues suggested that "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" reached a maximum body length of and a maximum body mass of by constructing a CT-based 3D skeletal model "with the axial column in neutral pose." They argued that the 2D graphical reconstruction of the aquatic hypothesis by Ibrahim and his colleagues in 2020 overestimated the presacral column length by 10%, ribcage depth by 25%, and forelimb length by 30% over dimensions based on CT-scanned fossils; these proportional overestimates shift the center of mass anteriorly when translated to a flesh model, and thus the estimate from Ibrahim and his colleagues cannot be considered a reliable body size estimate.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Its skull had a narrow snout filled with straight conical teeth that lacked serrations. There were six or seven teeth on each side of the very front of the upper jaw, in the premaxillae, and another twelve in both maxillae behind them. The second and third teeth on each side were noticeably larger than the rest of the teeth in the premaxilla, creating a space between them and the large teeth in the front of the maxilla; large teeth in the lower jaw faced this space. The very tip of the snout holding those few large front teeth was expanded, and a small crest was present in front of the eyes. Using the dimensions of three specimens known as MSNM V4047, UCPC-2, and BSP 1912 VIII 19, and assuming that the postorbital part of the skull of MSNM V4047 had a shape similar to the postorbital part of the skull of "Irritator", Dal Sasso and colleagues (2005) estimated that the skull of "Spinosaurus" was long, but more recent estimates suggest a length of . The Dal Sasso and colleagues skull length estimate is questioned because skull shapes can vary across spinosaurid species and because MSNM V4047 may not belong to "Spinosaurus" itself.


title: Spinosaurus

text: As a spinosaurid, "Spinosaurus" would have had a long, muscular neck, curved in a sigmoid, or S-shape. Its shoulders were prominent, and the forelimbs large and stocky, bearing three clawed digits on each hand. The first finger (or "thumb") would have been the largest. "Spinosaurus" had long phalanges (finger bones), and only somewhat recurved claws, suggesting that its hands were longer compared to those of other spinosaurids.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Very tall neural spines growing on the back vertebrae of "Spinosaurus" formed the basis of what is usually called the animal's "sail". The lengths of the neural spines reached over 10 times the diameters of the centra (vertebral bodies) from which they extended. The neural spines were slightly longer front to back at the base than higher up, and were unlike the thin rods seen in the pelycosaur finbacks "Edaphosaurus" and "Dimetrodon", contrasting also with the thicker spines in the iguanodontian "Ouranosaurus".


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" sails were unusual, although other dinosaurs, namely "Ouranosaurus", which lived a few million years earlier in the same general region as "Spinosaurus", and the South American sauropod "Amargasaurus," might have developed similar structural adaptations of their vertebrae. The sail may be an analog of the sail of the Permian synapsid "Dimetrodon", which lived before the dinosaurs even appeared, produced by convergent evolution.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The structure may also have been more hump-like than sail-like, as noted by Stromer in 1915 ("one might rather think of the existence of a large hump of fat <nowiki>[</nowiki>German: "Fettbuckel"], to which the [neural spines] gave internal support") and by Jack Bowman Bailey in 1997. In support of his "buffalo-back" hypothesis, Bailey argued that in "Spinosaurus", "Ouranosaurus", and other dinosaurs with long neural spines, the spines were relatively shorter and thicker than the spines of pelycosaurs (which were known to have sails); instead, the dinosaurs' neural spines were similar to the neural spines of extinct hump-backed mammals such as "Megacerops" and "Bison latifrons". In 2014, Ibrahim and colleagues instead posited that the spines were covered tightly by skin, similar to a crested chameleon, given their compactness, sharp edges, and likely poor blood flow.


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" had a significantly smaller pelvis (hip bone) than that of other giant theropods, with the surface area of the ilium (main body of the pelvis) half that of most members of the clade. The hind limbs were short, at just over 25 percent of the total body length, with the tibia (calf bone) being longer than the femur (thigh bone). Unlike in other theropods, the hallux (or fourth toe) of "Spinosaurus" touched the ground, and the phalanges of the toe bones were unusually long and well-built. At their ends were shallow claws that had flat bottoms. This type of foot morphology is also seen in shorebirds, indicating that "Spinosaurus"'s feet evolved for walking across unstable substrate and that they may have been webbed.


title: Spinosaurus

text: From the caudal vertebrae of the tail projected significantly elongated, thin neural spines, akin to the condition observed in some other spinosaurids, though to a more extreme degree. Coupled with the also elongated chevron bones on the underside of the caudals, this resulted in a deep and narrow tail with a paddle or fin-like shape, comparable to the tails of newts and crocodilians.


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" gives its name to the dinosaur family Spinosauridae, which includes two subfamilies: Baryonychinae and Spinosaurinae. Baryonychinae includes "Baryonyx" from southern England and "Suchomimus" from Niger in central Africa. Spinosaurinae includes "Spinosaurus", "Sigilmassasaurus", "Oxalaia", "Siamosaurus", "Ichthyovenator", "Irritator" from Brazil, and "Angaturama" (which may be synonymous with "Irritator") from Brazil. The spinosaurines share unserrated straight teeth that are widely spaced (e.g., 12 on one side of the maxilla), as opposed to the baryonychines, which have serrated curved teeth that are numerous (e.g., 30 on one side of the maxilla).


title: Spinosaurus

text: An analysis of Spinosauridae by Arden and colleagues (2018) named the clade Spinosaurini and defined it as all spinosaurids closer to "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" than to "Irritator challengeri" or "Oxalaia quilombensis"; it also found "Siamosaurus suteethorni" and "Icthyovenator laosensis" to be members of Spinosaurinae.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The subfamily Spinosaurinae was named by Sereno in 1998, and defined by Holtz and colleagues (2004) as all taxa closer to "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus" than to "Baryonyx walkeri". The subfamily Baryonychinae was named by Charig & Milner in 1986. They erected both the subfamily and the family Baryonychidae for the newly discovered "Baryonyx", before it was referred to Spinosauridae. Their subfamily was defined by Holtz and colleagues in 2004, as the complementary clade of all taxa closer to "Baryonyx walkeri" than to "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus". Examinations by Marcos Sales, Cesar Schultz, and colleagues (2017) indicate that the South American spinosaurids "Angaturama", "Irritator", and "Oxalaia" were intermediate between Baronychinae and Spinosaurinae based on their craniodental features and cladistic analysis. This indicates that Baryonychinae may in fact be non-monophyletic. Their cladogram can be seen below.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The function of the dinosaur's sail or hump is uncertain; scientists have proposed several hypotheses including heat regulation and display. In addition, such a prominent feature on its back could make it appear even larger than it was, intimidating other animals.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The structure may have been used for thermoregulation. If the structure contained abundant blood vessels, the animal could have used the sail's large surface area to absorb heat. This would imply that the animal was only partly warm-blooded at best and lived in climates where night-time temperatures were cool or low and the sky usually not cloudy. It is also possible that the structure was used to radiate excess heat from the body, rather than to collect it. Large animals, due to the relatively small ratio of surface area of their body compared to the overall volume (Haldane's principle), face far greater problems of dissipating excess heat at higher temperatures than gaining it at lower. Sails of large dinosaurs added considerably to the skin area of their bodies, with minimum increase of volume. Furthermore, if the sail was turned away from the sun, or positioned at a 90 degree angle towards a cooling wind, the animal would quite effectively cool itself in the warm climate of Cretaceous Africa. However, Bailey (1997) was of the opinion that a sail could have absorbed more heat than it radiated. Bailey proposed instead that "Spinosaurus" and other dinosaurs with long neural spines had fatty humps on their backs for energy storage, insulation, and shielding from heat.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Many elaborate body structures of modern-day animals serve to attract members of the opposite sex during mating. It is possible that the sail of "Spinosaurus" was used for courtship, in a way similar to a peacock's tail. Stromer speculated that the size of the neural spines may have differed between males and females.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Gimsa and colleagues (2015) suggest that the dorsal sail of "Spinosaurus" was analogous to the dorsal fins of sailfish and served a hydrodynamic purpose. Gimsa and others point out that more basal, long-legged spinosaurids had otherwise round or crescent-shaped dorsal sails, whereas in "Spinosaurus", the dorsal neural spines formed a shape that was roughly rectangular, similar in shape to the dorsal fins of sailfish. They therefore argue that "Spinosaurus" used its dorsal neural sail in the same manner as sailfish, and that it also employed its long narrow tail to stun prey like a modern thresher shark. Sailfish employ their dorsal fins for herding schools of fish into a "bait ball" where they cooperate to trap the fish into a certain area where the sailfish can snatch the fish with their bills.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The sail could have possibly reduced yaw rotation by counteracting the lateral force in the direction opposite to the slash as suggested by Gimsa and colleagues (2015). They specifically wrote:


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" anatomy exhibits another feature that may have a modern analogy: its long tail resembled that of the thresher shark, employed to slap the water to herd and stun shoals of fish before devouring them (Oliver and colleagues, 2013).


title: Spinosaurus

text: The strategies that sailfish and thresher sharks employ against shoaling fish are more effective when the shoal is first concentrated into a ‘bait ball’ (Helfman, Collette & Facey, 1997; Oliver and colleagues, 2013; Domenici and colleagues, 2014). Since this is difficult for individual predators to achieve, they cooperate in this effort. When herding a shoal of fish or squid, sailfish also raise their sails to make themselves appear larger. When they slash or wipe their bills through shoaling fish by turning their heads, their dorsal sail and fins are outstretched to stabilize their bodies hydrodynamically (Lauder & Drucker, 2004). Domenici and colleagues (2014) postulate that these fin extensions enhance the accuracy of tapping and slashing. The sail can reduce yaw rotation by counteracting the lateral force in the direction opposite to the slash. This means that prey is less likely to recognize the massive trunk as being part of an approaching predator (Marras and colleagues, 2015; Webb & Weihs 2015).


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" exhibited the anatomical features required to combine all three hunting strategies: a sail for herding prey more efficiently, as well as flexible tail and neck to slap the water for stunning, injuring or killing prey. The submerged dorsal sail would have provided a strong centreboard-like counterforce for powerful sidewards movements of the strong neck and long tail, as performed by sailfish (Domenici and colleagues, 2014) or thresher sharks (Oliver and colleagues, 2013). While smaller dorsal sails or fins make the dorsal water volume better accessible for slashing, it can be speculated that their smaller stabilization effect makes lateral slashing less efficient (e.g. for thresher sharks). Forming a hydrodynamic fulcrum and hydrodynamically stabilizing the trunk along the dorsoventral axis, "Spinosaurus"’ sail would also have compensated for the inertia of the lateral neck by tail movements and vice versa not only for predation but also for accelerated swimming. This behaviour might also have been one reason for "Spinosaurus"’ muscular chest and neck reported by Ibrahim and colleagues (2014).


title: Spinosaurus

text: It is unclear whether "Spinosaurus" was primarily a terrestrial predator or a piscivore, as indicated by its elongated jaws, conical teeth and raised nostrils. The hypothesis of spinosaurs as specialized fish eaters has been suggested before by A. J. Charig and A. C. Milner for "Baryonyx". They base this on the anatomical similarity with crocodilians and the presence of digestive acid-etched fish scales in the rib cage of the type specimen. Large fish are known from the faunas containing other spinosaurids, including the "Mawsonia", in the mid-Cretaceous of northern Africa and Brazil. Direct evidence for spinosaur diet comes from related European and South American taxa. "Baryonyx" was found with fish scales and bones from juvenile "Iguanodon" in its stomach, while a tooth embedded in a South American pterosaur bone suggests that spinosaurs occasionally preyed on pterosaurs, but "Spinosaurus" was likely to have been a generalized and opportunistic predator, possibly a Cretaceous equivalent of large grizzly bears, being biased toward fishing, though it undoubtedly scavenged and took many kinds of small or medium-sized prey.


title: Spinosaurus

text: In 2009, Dal Sasso and colleagues. reported the results of X-ray computed tomography of the MSNM V4047 snout. As the foramina on the outside all communicated with a space on the inside of the snout, the authors speculated that "Spinosaurus" had pressure receptors inside the space that allowed it to hold its snout at the surface of the water to detect swimming prey species without seeing them. A 2013 study by Andrew R. Cuff and Emily J. Rayfield concluded that bio-mechanical data suggests that "Spinosaurus" was not an obligate piscivore and that its diet was more closely associated with each individual's size. The characteristic rostral morphology of "Spinosaurus" allowed its jaws to resist bending in the vertical direction, however its jaws were poorly adapted with respect to resisting lateral bending compared to other members of this group ("Baryonyx") and modern alligators, thus showing "Spinosaurus" preyed more regularly on fish than it did on land animals, although considered predators of the former too.


title: Spinosaurus

text: A 2010 isotope analysis by Romain Amiot and colleagues found that oxygen isotope ratios of spinosaurid teeth, including teeth of "Spinosaurus", indicate semiaquatic lifestyles. Isotope ratios from tooth enamel and from other parts of "Spinosaurus" (found in Morocco and Tunisia) and of other predators from the same area such as "Carcharodontosaurus" were compared with isotopic compositions from contemporaneous theropods, turtles, and crocodilians. The study found that "Spinosaurus" teeth from five of six sampled localities had oxygen isotope ratios closer to those of turtles and crocodilians when compared with other theropod teeth from the same localities. The authors postulated that "Spinosaurus" switched between terrestrial and aquatic habitats to compete for food with large crocodilians and other large theropods respectively. A 2018 study by Donald Henderson, however, refutes the claim that "Spinosaurus" was semiaquatic. By studying the buoyancy in lungs of crocodilians and comparing it to the lung placement in "Spinosaurus", it was discovered that "Spinosaurus" could not sink or dive below the water surface. It was also capable of keeping its entire head above the water surface while floating, much like other non-aquatic theropods. Furthermore, the study found that "Spinosaurus" had to continually paddle its hind legs to prevent itself from tipping over onto its side, something that extant semiaquatic animals do not need to perform. Henderson therefore theorized that "Spinosaurus" probably did not hunt completely submerged in water as previously hypothesized, but instead would have spent much of its time on land or in shallow water.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Recent studies of the tail vertebrae of "Spinosaurus" refute Henderson's proposal that Spinosaurus mainly inhabited areas of land near and in shallow water and was too buoyant to submerge. Studies of the tail, thanks to specimens recovered and analyzed by Ibrahim, Pierce, Lauder, and Sereno and colleagues in 2018 indicate that "Spinosaurus" had a keeled tail that was well adapted to propelling the animal through water. The elongated neural spines and chevrons, which run to the end of the tail on both dorsal and ventral sides, indicate that "Spinosaurus" was able to swim in a similar manner to modern crocodilians. Through experimentation by Lauder and Pierce, the tail of "Spinosaurus" was found to have eight times as much forward thrust as the tails of terrestrial theropods like "Coelophysis" and "Allosaurus", as well as being twice as efficient at achieving forward thrust. The discovery indicates that "Spinosaurus" may have had a lifestyle comparable to modern alligators and crocodiles, remaining in water for long periods of time while hunting.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Dr David Hone and Dr Thomas Holtz published a paper in January 2021 in which they argue that the anatomy of "Spinosaurus" is more consistent with a shoreline generalist lifestyle rather than an active aquatic pursuit predator as suggested by Ibrahim. They highlight the positioning of the nostrils and orbits as one reason why a crocodile-like lifestyle is unlikely: they are ventrally positioned in such a way that the whole head would have to be lifted inefficiently out of the water in order to breathe. Additionally, they argue that the general body shape of "Spinosaurus" is poorly adapted for this lifestyle, drawing on the amount of water drag and aquatic instability from the sail, as well as the rigid trunk and seemingly scarcely-muscled tail. Animals like crocodilians require a flexible body in order to move through the water and make sharp turns when chasing prey, and this is directly contradicted by Hone and Holtz's findings.


title: Spinosaurus

text: A 2022 study by Fabbri "et al.", made comparisons of "Spinosaurus" bone structure and compared it to that of "Baryonyx" and "Suchomimus". The study revealed that "Spinosaurus" and "Baryonyx" had dense bones, which allowed them to dive and pursue prey underwater. Compared to these, "Suchomimus" had more hollow bones, suggesting it preferred to hunt in shallow water. These findings also suggest that various spinosaurid genera were more ecologically disparate than previously believed, as some were better suited to hunting in subaqueous environments than other, closely related genera.


title: Spinosaurus

text: In the same year, contradicting the study by Fabbri and colleagues, Sereno and his colleagues suggested that "Spinosaurus" was wholly bipedal on land and an unstable, slow moving surface swimmer in deep water. Their results, taken from reconstructing a CT model of the skeleton, and then adding internal air and muscles. Their results, coupled with fossils from "Spinosaurus" that showed it also lived further inland along rivers and lakes, suggest it was a semi-aquatic, ambush piscivore that preferred waterside environments both along the coasts and further inland along rivers and lakes. Simultaneously, they suggested that the large tail fin was probably utilized more for display than swimming, as tails in living animals have the same function when they possess comparably tall neural spines.


title: Spinosaurus

text: Although traditionally depicted in the scientific community as a biped, "Spinosaurus" was often depicted in the mid-20th century as an obligate quadruped akin to "Dimetrodon". Starting in the mid-1970s, it was hypothesised "Spinosaurus" was at least an occasional quadruped, bolstered by the discovery of "Baryonyx", a relative with robust arms. Because of the mass of the hypothesized fatty dorsal humps of "Spinosaurus", Bailey (1997) was open to the possibility of a quadrupedal posture, leading to new restorations of it as such. Theropods, including spinosaurids, could not pronate their hands (rotate the forearm so the palm faced the ground), but a resting position on the side of the hand was possible, as shown by fossil prints from an Early Jurassic theropod. The hypothesis that "Spinosaurus" had a typical quadrupedal gait since fell out of favour, however it was still believed that spinosaurids may have crouched in a quadrupedal posture, due to biological and physiological constraints.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The possibility of a quadrupedal "Spinosaurus" was revived by a 2014 paper by Ibrahim and colleagues that described new material of the animal. The paper found that the hind limbs of "Spinosaurus" were much shorter than previously believed, and that its center of mass was located in the midpoint of the trunk region, as opposed to near the hip as in typical bipedal theropods. It was therefore proposed that "Spinosaurus" was poorly adapted for bipedal terrestrial locomotion, and must have been an obligate quadruped on land. The reconstruction used in the study was an extrapolation based on different sized individuals, scaled to what were assumed to be the correct proportions. Paleontologist John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College of the University of London has expressed scepticism to the new reconstruction, and cautioned that using different specimens can result in inaccurate chimaeras. Scott Hartman also expressed criticism because he believed the legs and the pelvis were inaccurately scaled (27% too short) and didn't match the published lengths. However, Mark Witton expressed agreement with the proportions reported in the paper. In their 2015 re-description of "Sigilmassasaurus", Evers and colleagues argued that "Sigilmassasaurus" was in fact a distinct genus from "Spinosaurus", and therefore doubted whether the material assigned to "Spinosaurus" by Ibrahim "et al." should be assigned to "Spinosaurus" or "Sigilmassasaurus". In 2018, an analysis by Henderson found that "Spinosaurus" probably was competent at bipedal terrestrial locomotion; the centre of mass was instead found to be close to the hips, allowing "Spinosaurus" to stand upright like other bipedal theropods.


title: Spinosaurus

text: An ungual phalanx measuring belonging to a very young juvenile "Spinosaurus" indicates that the theropod developed its semiaquatic adaptations at a very young age or at birth and maintained them throughout its life. The specimen, found in 1999 and described by Simone Maganuco and Cristiano Dal Sasso and colleagues, is believed to have come from an animal measuring (assuming it resembled a smaller version of the adult), making it the smallest specimen of "Spinosaurus" currently known.


title: Spinosaurus

text: The environment inhabited by "Spinosaurus" is only partially understood, and covers a great deal of what is now northern Africa. The region of Africa "Spinosaurus" is preserved in dates from 112 to 93.5 million years ago, although a potential specimen has been found in Campanian deposits. A 1996 study concluded from Moroccan fossils that "Spinosaurus", "Carcharodontosaurus", and "Deltadromeus" "ranged across north Africa during the late Cretaceous (Cenomanian)." Those "Spinosaurus" that lived in the Bahariya Formation of what is now Egypt may have contended with shoreline conditions on tidal flats and channels, living in mangrove forests alongside similarly large dinosaurian predators "Bahariasaurus" and "Carcharodontosaurus", the titanosaur sauropods "Paralititan" and "Aegyptosaurus", crocodylomorphs, bony and cartilaginous fish, turtles, lizards, and plesiosaurs. In the dry season it might have resorted to preying on pterosaurs. This situation resembles that in the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of North America, which boasts up to five theropod genera over in weight, as well as several smaller genera (Henderson, 1998; Holtz "and colleagues", 2004). Differences in head shape and body size among the large North African theropods may have been enough to allow niche partitioning as seen among the many different predator species found today in the African savanna (Farlow & Pianka, 2002).


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" appeared in the 2001 film "Jurassic Park III", replacing "Tyrannosaurus" as the main antagonist. The film's consulting paleontologist John R. Horner was quoted as saying, "If we base the ferocious factor on the length of the animal, there was nothing that ever lived on this planet that could match this creature ["Spinosaurus"]. Also my hypothesis is that T-rex was actually a scavenger rather than a killer. "Spinosaurus" was really the predatory animal." He has since retracted the statement about "T. rex" being a scavenger. In the film, "Spinosaurus" was portrayed as larger and more powerful than "Tyrannosaurus": in a scene depicting a battle between the two resurrected predators, "Spinosaurus" emerges victorious by snapping the "Tyrannosaurus"' neck. In the fourth film, "Jurassic World", there is a nod to this fight where the "T. rex" smashes through the skeleton of a "Spinosaurus" in the climactic fight near the end of the film. The same "Spinosaurus" from the third film returns in the fourth season of "".


title: Spinosaurus

text: "Spinosaurus" has long been depicted in popular books about dinosaurs, although only recently has there been enough information about spinosaurids for an accurate depiction. After an influential 1955 skeletal reconstruction by Lapparent and Lavocat based on a 1936 diagram by Stromer, it has been treated as a generalized upright theropod, with a skull similar to that of other large theropods and a sail on its back, even having four-fingered hands.


title: Spinosaurus

text: In addition to films, action figures, video games, and books, "Spinosaurus" has been depicted on postage stamps from countries such as Angola, The Gambia, and Tanzania.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the "Stuttgarter Kessel" (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the Swabian Jura and the Black Forest. Stuttgart has a population of 635,911, making it the sixth largest city in Germany. 2.8 million people live in the city's administrative region and 5.3 million people in its metropolitan area, making it the fourth largest metropolitan area in Germany. The city and metropolitan area are consistently ranked among the top 20 European metropolitan areas by GDP; Mercer listed Stuttgart as 21st on its 2015 list of cities by quality of living; innovation agency 2thinknow ranked the city 24th globally out of 442 cities in its Innovation Cities Index; and the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ranked the city as a Beta-status global city in their 2020 survey. Stuttgart was one of the host cities for the official tournaments of the 1974 and 2006 FIFA World Cups.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is unusual in the scheme of German cities. It is spread across a variety of hills (some of them covered in vineyards), valleys (especially around the Neckar river and the Stuttgart basin) and parks. The city is known as the "cradle of the automobile". As such, it is home to famous automobile museums like the Mercedes-Benz Museum and Porsche Museum, as well as numerous auto-enthusiast magazines, which contributes to Stuttgart's status as Germany's ""Autohauptstadt"" ("car capital city"). The city's tourism slogan is "Stuttgart offers more". Under current plans to improve transport links to the international infrastructure (as part of the Stuttgart 21 project), Stuttgart unveiled a new city logo and slogan in March 2008, describing itself as """" ("The new Heart of Europe"). For business, it describes itself as "Where business meets the future". In July 2010, the city unveiled a new logo, designed to entice more business people to stay in the city and enjoy breaks in the area.


title: Stuttgart

text: Since the seventh millennium BC, the Stuttgart area has been an important agricultural area and has been host to a number of cultures seeking to utilize the rich soil of the Neckar valley. The Roman Empire conquered the area in AD 83 and built a massive near Bad Cannstatt, making it the most important regional centre for several centuries. Stuttgart's roots were truly laid in the tenth century with its founding by Liudolf, Duke of Swabia, as a stud farm for his warhorses. Initially overshadowed by nearby Bad Cannstatt, the town grew steadily and was granted a charter in 1320. The fortunes of Stuttgart turned with those of the House of Württemberg, and they made it the capital of their county, duchy, and kingdom from the 15th century to 1918. Stuttgart prospered despite setbacks in the Thirty Years' War and devastating air raids by the Allies on the city and its automobile production during World War II. However, by 1952, the city had bounced back and became the major economic, industrial, tourism and publishing centre it is today.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is known for its strong high-tech industry, especially in the automotive sector. It has the highest general standard of prosperity of any German city. In addition to many medium-sized companies, several major corporations are headquartered in Stuttgart, including Porsche, Bosch, and Mercedes-Benz Group. Stuttgart is an important financial center; the Stuttgart Stock Exchange is the second largest in Germany (after Frankfurt), and the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) is Germany's largest Landesbank. Stuttgart is also a major transport junction; it is among the most congested conurbations of Europe, and its airport is the sixth-busiest in Germany (2019). Stuttgart is a city with a high number of immigrants; according to Dorling Kindersley's "Eyewitness Travel Guide to Germany", "In the city of Stuttgart, every third inhabitant is a foreigner." 40% of Stuttgart's residents, and 64% of the population below the age of five, are of immigrant background.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart, often nicknamed the ""Schwabenmetropole"" () in reference to its location in the centre of Swabia and the local dialect spoken by the native Swabians, has its etymological roots in the Old High German word "Stuotgarten", or "stud farm", because the city was founded in 950 AD by Duke Liudolf of Swabia to breed warhorses.


title: Stuttgart

text: In the local dialects of Alemannic German it can be "Schtuegert", and in Swabian German "Stuagart"; with similar variant spellings, usually dropping the central T sound.


title: Stuttgart

text: Originally, the most important location in the Neckar river valley was the hilly rim of the Stuttgart basin at what is today Bad Cannstatt. Thus, the first settlement of Stuttgart was a massive Roman "Castra stativa" (Cannstatt Castrum) built AD to protect the Villas and vineyards blanketing the landscape and the road from Mogontiacum (Mainz) to Augusta Vindelicorum (Augsburg). As with many military installations, a settlement sprang up nearby and remained there even after the limes moved further east. When they did, the town was left in the capable hands of a local brickworks that produced sophisticated architectural ceramics and pottery. When the Romans were driven back past the Rhine and Danube rivers in the third century by the Alamanni, the settlement temporarily vanished from history until the seventh century.


title: Stuttgart

text: In 700, Duke Gotfrid mentions a "Chan Stada" in a document regarding property. Archaeological evidence shows that later Merovingian era Frankish farmers continued to till the same land the Romans did.


title: Stuttgart

text: Cannstatt is mentioned in the Abbey of St. Gall's archives as ""Canstat ad Neccarum"" () in 708. The etymology of the name ""Cannstatt"" is not clear, but as the site is mentioned as "condistat" in the Annals of Metz (9th century), it is mostly derived from the Latin word "condita" ("foundation"), suggesting that the name of the Roman settlement might have had the prefix ""Condi-"." Alternatively, Sommer (1992) suggested that the Roman site corresponds to the "Civitas Aurelia G" attested to in an inscription found near Öhringen. There have also been attempts at a derivation from a Gaulish "*kondâti-" "confluence".


title: Stuttgart

text: In AD 950, Duke Liudolf of Swabia, son of the current Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, decided to establish a stud farm for his cavalry during the Hungarian invasions of Europe on a widened area of the Nesenbach river valley south of the old Roman castrum. The land and title of Duke of Swabia remained in Liudolf's hands until his rebellion was quashed by his father four years later. In 1089, Bruno of Calw built the precursor building to the Old Castle.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart's viticulture, first documented in the Holy Roman Empire in the year AD 1108, kept people in the area of that stud farm for some time, but the area was still largely overshadowed by nearby Cannstatt because of its role as a local crossroad for many major European trade routes. Nevertheless, the existence of a settlement here (despite the terrain being more suited for that original stud farm) during the High Middle Ages is provided by a gift registry from Hirsau Abbey dated to around 1160 that mentions a "Hugo de Stuokarten". A settlement at this locale was again mentioned in 1229, but this time by Pope Gregory IX. In AD 1219, Stuttgart (then Stuotgarten) became a possession of Herman V, Margrave of Baden. In addition to Backnang, Pforzheim, and Besigheim, Hermann would also found the Stuttgart we know today in c. 1220. In 1251, the city passed to the Ulrich I von Württemberg as part of Mechthild von Baden's dowry. His son, Eberhard I "the Illustrious", would be the first to begin the many major expansions of Stuttgart under the House of Württemberg.


title: Stuttgart

text: Eberhard desired to expand the realm his father had built through military action with the aid of the anti-king Henry Raspe IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, but was thwarted by the action of Emperor Rudolph I. Further resistance by Eberhard I against the Emperor's created Vogts and Bailiwicks as well as the newly appointed Duke of Swabia Rudolf II, Duke of Austria, eventually led to armed conflict and initial successes upon Emperor Rudolph I's death in 1291 against the Emperor's men. After initially defeating his regional rivals, Henry VII, newly elected as Emperor, decided to take action against Eberhard I in 1311 during his war with the Free imperial city of Esslingen by ordering his Vogt, Konrad IV von Weinberg, to declare war on Eberhard I. Eberhard I, defeated on the battlefield, lost Stuttgart and his castle (razed in 1311) to Esslingen and the city was thus managed by the city state from 1312 to 1315. Total destruction of the county was prevented by Henry VII's death on 24 August 1313 and the elections of Louis IV as King of the Germans and Frederick III as anti-king. Eberhard seized the opportunity granted to him by the political chaos, and recaptured his hometown and birthplace in 1316, and made much territorial gain. With peace restored at last, Eberhard began repairs and expansion to Stuttgart beginning with the reconstruction of Wirtemberg Castle, ancestral home to the House of Württemberg, in 1317 and then began expansion of the city's defenses. The early 1320s were important years for Stuttgart: Eberhard I moved the seat of the county to the city to a new and expanded castle, the collegiate church in Beutelsbach, where previous members of the Württemberg dynasty had been buried prior to its destruction in 1311, moved to its current location in Stuttgart in 1320, and the town's Stiftkirche was expanded into an abbey, and the control of the Martinskirche by the Bishopric of Constance was broken by Papal order in 1321. A year after the city became the principal seat of the Counts of Württemberg in 1320, the city was granted status as a city and given civic rights. At the end of the 14th century, new suburbs sprang up around Leonhard Church and near the city's fortifications as well. Towards the end of the 15th century, Count Ulrich V began construction of a new suburb on the northeastern edge of the city around the Dominican monastery Hospitalkirche. In the 1457, the first Landtag of the Estates of Württemberg was established in Stuttgart and a similar institution was established in Leonberg. After the temporary partitions of the County of Württemberg by the Treaties of Nürtingen, Münsingen, and Esslingen, Stuttgart was once again declared the capital of the county in 1483.


title: Stuttgart

text: In 1488, Stuttgart officially became the de facto residence of the Count himself as opposed to the location of his home, the Old Castle. Eberhard I, then Count Eberhard V, became the first Duke of Württemberg in 1495, and made Stuttgart the seat of the Duchy of Württemberg in addition to the County thereof. All this would be lost to the Württembergs during the reign of his son, Ulrich. Though Ulrich initially made territorial gains as a result of his decision to fight alongside the Emperor Maximilian I, he was no friend of the powerful Swabian League nor of his own subjects, who launched the Poor Conrad rebellion of 1514. Despite this and his rivalry with the Swabian League, his undoing would actually come in the form of his unhappy marriage to Sabina of Bavaria. In 1515, Ulrich killed an imperial knight and lover of Sabina's by the name of Hans von Hutten, obliging her to flee to the court of her brother, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, who successfully had Ulrich placed under Imperial ban twice. When the Emperor died in 1519, Ulrich struck, seizing the Free Imperial City of Reutlingen, prompting the League to intervene. That same year, Ulrich was soundly defeated and he was driven into exile in France and Switzerland following the League's conquest of Württemberg. Württemberg was then sold by the League to Emperor Charles V, who then granted it to his brother, Ferdinand I, thus beginning the 12 year ownership of the county by the Habsburgs. When the peasants Ulrich had crushed before rose once again in the German Peasants' War, Stuttgart was occupied by the peasant armies for a few days in the Spring of 1525. Ulrich, with the help of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, seized the chance to restore himself to power (albeit as an Austrian vassal) in the turmoil of the Reformation and War with the Turks and invited Erhard Schnepf to bring the Reformation to Stuttgart. He accepted, was named Court Preacher in Stuttgart, and worked in concert with Ambrosius Blarer until his dismissal following his resistance to the Augsburg Interim by the Duke in 1548. Duke Ulrich himself died two years later, and was succeeded by his son, Christoph. He had grown up in a Württemberg in turmoil, and wished to rebuild its image. To this end, he once again began a construction boom all over the Duchy under the direction of Court Architect Aberlin Tretsch; knowing full well that the time of the Reisekönigtum was over, Christoph and Tretsch rebuilt and remodeled the Old Castle into a Renaissance palace, and from 1542 to 1544, what is today the Schillerplatz was built as a town square. Duke Christoph also responded to the increasing made for drinking water by embarking upon a massive hydraulic engineering project in the form of a tunnel to Pffaf Lake, the Glems, and the Nesenbach from 1566 to 1575. In 1575, Georg Beer was also appointed Court Architect, and he built the Lusthaus. But it was architect Heinrich Schickhardt who would carry Tretsch's torch further; Schickhardt constructed the Stammheim Castle in the suburb of Stammheim, rebuilt the Fruchtkasten in the today's Schillerplatz, and expanded the Prinzebau.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Thirty Years' War devastated the city, and it would slowly decline for a period of time from then on. After the catastrophic defeat of the Protestant Heilbronn League by the Habsburgs at Nörlingen in 1634, Duke Eberhard III and his court fled in exile to Strasbourg, abandoning the Duchy to looting by pro-Habsburg forces. The Habsburgs once again had full reign of the city for another four years, and in that time Stuttgart had to carry the burden of billeting the pro-Habsburg armies in Swabia. Ferdinand III, King of the Romans, entered the city in 1634 and, two years later in 1636, once again attempted to re-Catholicize Württemberg. The next year, the Bubonic plague struck and devastated the population. The Duke returned in 1638 to a realm somewhat partitioned to Catholic factions in the region, and entirely ravaged by the war. In the Duchy itself, battle, famine, plague and war reduced the Duchy's population of 350,000 in 1618 to 120,000 in 1648 – about 57% of the population of Württemberg. Recovery would be slow for the next several decades, but began nonetheless with the city's first bookstore in 1650 and high school in 1686. This progress was almost entirely undone when French soldiers under Ezéchiel du Mas appeared outside the city's walls in 1688 during the Nine Years' War, but the city was saved from another sack due to the diplomatic ability of Magdalena Sibylla, reigning over Württemberg as regent for her son, Eberhard Ludwig.


title: Stuttgart

text: For the first time in centuries, Duke Eberhard Ludwig moved the seat of the Duchy out of the declining city of Stuttgart in 1718 to Ludwigsburg, founded in 1704, while the namesake Baroque palace, known as the "Versailles of Swabia", was still under construction. When Eberhard Ludwig died, his nephew Charles Alexander, ascended to the throne. Charles Alexander himself died in 1737, meaning his son Charles Eugene became the premature Duke (and later King) at the age of nine. When he came of age and returned from his tutoring at the court of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, Charles desired to move the capital back to Stuttgart. He commissioned the construction of the New Castle in 1746, Castle Solitude in 1763, Castle Hohenheim in 1785, and the Karlsschule in 1770. The rule of Charles Eugene also saw the tutoring and origins of Friedrich Schiller in Stuttgart, who studied medicine and completed The Robbers here. Stuttgart, at the end of the 18th century, remained a very provincial town of 20,000 residents, narrow alleys, and agriculture and livestock. Despite being the capital and seat of the Duchy, the general staff of the Army of Württemberg was not present in the city. In 1794, Duke Charles dissolved the Karlsschule to prevent the spreading of revolutionary ideas.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart was proclaimed capital once more when Württemberg became an electorate in 1803, and was yet again named as capital when the Kingdom of Württemberg was formed in 1805 by the Peace of Pressburg.


title: Stuttgart

text: King Frederick I's Württemberg was given high status in the Confederation of the Rhine among the College of Kings, and the lands of nearby secondary German states. Within Stuttgart, the royal residence was expanded under Frederick although many of Stuttgart's most important buildings, including Wilhelm Palace, Katharina Hospital, the State Gallery, the Villa Berg and the Königsbau were built under the reign of King Wilhelm I. In 1818. King Wilhelm I and Queen Catherine in an attempt to assuage the suffering caused by the Year Without Summer and following famine, introduced the first Cannstatter Volksfest to celebrate the year's bountiful harvest. Hohenheim University was founded in 1818, and two years later the Württemberg Mausoleum as completed on the hill where Wirtemberg Castle once stood.


title: Stuttgart

text: From the outset of the 19th century, Stuttgart's development was once again impeded by its location (population of the city at the time was around 50,000), but the city began to experience the beginning of economic revival with the opening of the Main Station in 1846. Prior to then, the signs of rebirth in Stuttgart were evidenced by the construction of such buildings of Rosenstein Castle in 1822–1830, the Wilhelmspalais 1834–1840, and the foundations of the Staatsgalerie in 1843, University of Stuttgart in 1829, the University of Music and Performing Arts later, in 1857. Stuttgart had a role to play during the revolution of 1848/1849 as well. When internal divisions of the Frankfurt Parliament began the demise of that congress, the majority of the Frankfurt Congress voted to move to Stuttgart to flee the reach of the Prussian and Austrian armies in Frankfurt and Mainz. Even though the Congress may have had contacts with revolutionaries in Baden and Württemberg, the Congress, not popular with the content citizens of Stuttgart, were driven out by the King's army.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart's literary tradition also bore yet more fruits, being the home of such writers of national importance as Wilhelm Hauff, Ludwig Uhland, Gustav Schwab, and Eduard Mörike. From 1841 to 1846, the Jubiläumssäule was erected on the Schlossplatz before the New Palace according to the plans of Johann Michael Knapp to celebrate the rule of King Wilhelm I. A decade later, the Königsbau was constructed by Knapp and court architect Christian Friedrich von Leins as a concert hall. Another milestone in Stuttgart's history was the running of the first rail line from Cannstatt to Untertürkheim on 22 October 1845. The advent of Industrialisation in Germany heralded a major growth of population for Stuttgart: In 1834, Stuttgart counted 35,200 inhabitants, rose to 50,000 in 1852, 69,084 inhabitants in 1864, and finally 91,000 residents in 1871. By 1874, Stuttgart once again exceeded the 100,000 inhabitant mark. This number doubled, due to the incorporation of local towns, to approximately 185,000 in 1901 and then 200,000 in 1904. In 1871, Württemberg joined the German Empire created by Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia, during the Unification of Germany, as an autonomous kingdom.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is purported to be the location of the automobile's invention by Karl Benz and then industrialized by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in a small workshop in Bad Cannstatt that would become Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1887. As a result, it is considered to be the starting point of the worldwide automotive industry and is sometimes referred to as the 'cradle of the automobile', and today Mercedes-Benz and Porsche both have their headquarters in Stuttgart, as well as automotive parts giants Bosch and Mahle. The year prior, Robert Bosch opened his first "Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering" in Stuttgart. In 1907, the International Socialist Congress was held in Stuttgart was attended by about 60,000 people. In 1912, VfB Stuttgart was founded. Two years later, the current iteration of the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof was completed according to plan by Paul Bonatz from 1914 to 1927.


title: Stuttgart

text: During World War I, the city was a target of air raids. In 1915, 29 bombs struck the city and the nearby Rotebühlkaserne, killing four soldiers and injuring another 43, and likewise killing four civilians. The next major air raid on Stuttgart occurred 15 September 1918, when structural damage caused house collapses that killed eleven people.


title: Stuttgart

text: At the end of the First World War, November revolutionaries stormed the Wilhelmpalais on 30 November 1918 to force King Wilhelm II to abdicate, but failed halfway. Under pressure from the revolutionaries, Wilhelm II refused the crown, but also refused to abdicate the throne. When he did eventually abdicate, the Free State of Württemberg was established as a part of the Weimar Republic, and Stuttgart was declared its capital. On 26 April 1919, a new constitution was devised, and the final draft was approved and ratified on 25 September 1919 by the Constituent Assembly. In 1920, Stuttgart temporarily became the seat of the German National Government when the administration fled from Berlin from the Kapp Putsch. Also in 1920, Erwin Rommel became the company commander of the 13th Infantry Regiment based in Stuttgart and would remain as such for the next nine years.


title: Stuttgart

text: Due to the Nazi Party's practice of "Gleichschaltung", Stuttgart's political importance as state capital became totally nonexistent, though it remained the cultural and economic centre of the central Neckar region. Stuttgart, one of the cities bestowed an honorary title by the Nazi regime, was given the moniker "City of the Abroad Germans" in 1936. The first prototypes of the Volkswagen Beetle were manufactured in Stuttgart, according to designs by Ferdinand Porsche, by a design team including Erwin Komenda and Karl Rabe.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Hotel Silber (), previously occupied by other forms of political police, was occupied by the Gestapo in 1933 to detain and torture political dissidents. The hotel was used for the transit of Nazi prisoners of conscience including Eugen Bolz, Kurt Schumacher, and Lilo Herrmann to concentration camps. The nearby court at Archive Street () 12A was also used as a central location for executions in Southwest Germany, as the headstone located in its atrium dedicated to the 419 lives lost there recalls. Participants of the Kristallnacht burned the Old Synagogue to the ground along with the relics contained within and also destroyed its Jewish cemetery. The next year the Nazi regime began the arrests and deportation of Stuttgart's Jewish inhabitants, beginning with the entire male Jewish population of Stuttgart, to the police-run prison camp at Welzheim or directly to Dachau. Other Jews from around Württemberg were brought to Stuttgart and housed in the ghetto on the former Trade Fair grounds in Killesberg. As the Memorial at Stuttgart North records, between 1941 (the first train arrived 1 December 1941, and took around 1,000 men to Riga) and 1945, more than 2,000 Jews from all over Württemberg were deported to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and the ghettos at Riga and Izbica. Of them, only 180 held in Internment survived the Shoah.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart, like many of Germany's major cities, was ravaged throughout the war by Allied air raids. For the first four years of the war, successful air raids on the city were rare because of the capable defence of the city by Wehrmacht ground forces, the Luftwaffe, and artificial fog. Despite opinions among some Royal Air Force members that day-time air raids on the city were suicidal, substantial damage to the city's industrial capacity still occurred, such as the 25 August bombing of the Daimler AG plant in 1940 that killed five people. With the war increasingly turning against the Third Reich, more and more troops were pulled from the defence of the city in 1943 to fight on the Eastern Front. In 1944, the city centre was entirely in ruins due to Allied bombing raids that could now more easily attack the city. The heaviest raid took place on 12 September 1944, when the Royal Air Force, dropping over 184,000 bombs – including 75 blockbusters – levelled Stuttgart's city centre, killing 957 people in the resulting firestorm. In totality, Stuttgart was subjected to 53 bombing raids, resulting in the destruction of 57.7% of all buildings in the city, the deaths of 4,477 inhabitants, the disappearance of 85 citizens, and the injury of 8,908 more people. The Allies lost 300 aircraft and seven to ten enlisted men. To commemorate the city citizens who died during the war, the rubble was assembled and used to create the Birkenkopf.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Allied ground advance into Germany reached Stuttgart in April 1945. Although the attack on the city was to be conducted by the US Seventh Army's 100th Infantry Division, French leader Charles de Gaulle found this to be unacceptable, as he felt the capture of the region by Free French forces would increase French influence in post-war decisions. Independently, he directed General de Lattre to order the French 5th Armored Division, 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division and 3rd Algerian Infantry Division to begin their drive to Stuttgart on 18 April 1945. Two days later, the French forces coordinated with the US Seventh Army and VI Corps heavy artillery, who began a barrage of the city. The French 5th Armored Division then captured Stuttgart on 21 April 1945, encountering little resistance. The city fared poorly under their direction; French troops forcefully quartered their troops in what housing remained in the city, rapes were frequent (there were at least 1389 recorded incidents of rape of civilians by French soldiers), and the city's surviving populace were poorly rationed. The circumstances of what later became known as "The Stuttgart Crisis" provoked political repercussions that reached even the White House. President Harry S. Truman was unable to get De Gaulle to withdraw troops from Stuttgart until after the final boundaries of the zones of occupation were established. The French army remained in the city until they finally relented to American demands on 8 July 1945 and withdrew. Stuttgart then became capital of Württemberg-Baden, one of the three areas of Allied occupation in Baden-Württemberg, from 1945 until 1952.


title: Stuttgart

text: The military government of the American occupation zone established a Displaced persons camp for displaced persons, mostly forced labourers from Central and Eastern European industrial firms in the area. There was, however, a camp located in Stuttgart-West that, until its closure and transportation of internees to Heidenheim an der Brenz in 1949, housed almost exclusively 1400 Jewish survivors of the Shoah.


title: Stuttgart

text: An early concept of the Marshall Plan aimed at supporting reconstruction and economic/political recovery across Europe was presented during a speech 6 September 1946 given by US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes at the Stuttgart Opera House. His speech led to the unification of the British and American occupation zones, resulting in the 'bi-zone' (later the 'tri-zone' when the French reluctantly agreed to cede their occupied territory to the new state). In 1948, the city applied to become the capital of the soon to-be Federal Republic of Germany, and was a serious contender against Frankfurt, Kassel, and Bonn. All these cities were examined by the Parlamentarischer Rat, but ultimately Bonn won the bid when the Republic was founded on 23 May 1949. The city's bid for capital failed primarily because of the financial burdens its high rents would place on the government.


title: Stuttgart

text: The immediate aftermath of the War would be marked by the controversial efforts of Arnulf Klett, the first Oberbürgermeister of Stuttgart, to restore the city. Klett favored the idea of a modernist Automotive city with functional divisions for residential, commercial and industrial areas according to the Athens Charter. Klett demolished both ruins and entire streets of largely undamaged buildings without rebuilding them to their original visage, a move that earned him much scorn from his contemporaries. In the 150th year since his death (1955), the last remnant of the alma mater of Friederich Schiller, the Karlsschule, was removed in favor of an expansion to the Bundesstraße 14. Klett also dramatically expanded the public transportation of Stuttgart with the Stuttgart Stadtbahn and, in 1961, initiated a city partnership with the French city of Strasbourg as part of an attempt to mend Franco-German relations. It would be finalized in 1962 and is still active today. Klett's Stuttgart saw two major media events: the same year the partnership with Strasbourg was finalized, then French president Charles de Gaulle visited the city and Ludwigsburg Palace in the ending moments of his state visit to Germany, and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited the city 24 May 1965.


title: Stuttgart

text: On 25 April 1952, the other two parts of the former German states of Baden and Württemberg, South Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern merged and formed the modern German state of Baden-Württemberg, with Stuttgart as its capital. Since the 1950s, Stuttgart has been the third largest city in southern Germany behind Frankfurt and Munich. The city's population, halved by the Second World War, began sudden growth with the mass influx of German refugees expelled from their homes and communities by the Soviets from the late 1940s until 1950 to the city. Economic migrants, called ""Gastarbeiter"," from Italy, and later Greece and Turkey but primarily from Yugoslavia, came flocking to Stuttgart because of the economic wonder called the ""Wirtschaftswunder"" unfolding in West Germany. These factors saw the city reach its (then) peak population of 640,000 in 1962.


title: Stuttgart

text: In May 1965 Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Stuttgart and nearby Marbach and Schwäbisch Hall. Her great-grandfather Duke Francis (1837-1900) had been a member of the Württemberg royal family.


title: Stuttgart

text: In the late 1970s, the municipal district of Stammheim was centre stage to one of the most controversial periods of German post-war history. Stammheim Prison, built from 1959 to 1963, came to be the place of incarceration for Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, members of a communist terrorist organization known as the Red Army Faction, during their trial at the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart in 1975. Several attempts were made by the organization to free the terrorists during the "German Autumn" of 1977 that culminated in such events as the kidnap and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181. When it became clear, after many attempts to free the inmates including the smuggling of three weapons into the prison by their lawyer, that the terrorists could not escape and that they would receive Life sentencing, the terrorists killed themselves in April 1977 in an event remembered locally as the ""Todesnacht von Stammheim"," "Night of Death at Stammheim."


title: Stuttgart

text: The trauma of the early 1970s was quickly left behind, starting in 1974 with the 1974 FIFA World Cup and the opening of the Stuttgart S-Bahn on 1 October 1978 with a scheduled three routes. from 17 to 19 June 1983, ten European heads of state and representatives from the European Union met in Stuttgart for a summit and there made the Solemn Declaration on European Union. In 1986, the European Athletics Championships of that year were held in the Mercedes-Benz Arena. Mikhail Gorbachev, while on a trip to West Germany to offer a spot for a West German astronaut in a Soviet space mission, visited Stuttgart 14 June 1989 and was the honored guest of a sumptuous reception held at the New Palace.


title: Stuttgart

text: Since the monumental happenings of the 1980s, Stuttgart has continued being an important centre of not just Europe, but also the world. In 1993, the World Horticultural Exposition, for which two new bridges were built, and World Athletics Championships of that year took place in Stuttgart in the Killesburg park and Mercedes-Benz Area respectively, bringing millions of new visitors to the city. At the 1993 WCA, British athlete Sally Gunnell and the United States Relay team both set world records. In 2003, Stuttgart applied for the 2012 Summer Olympics but failed in their bid when the German Committee for the Olympics decided on Leipzig to host the Olympics in Germany. Three years later, in 2006, Stuttgart once again hosted the FIFA World Cup as it had in 1974.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart still experienced some growing pains even long after its recovery from the Second World War. In 2010, the inner city become the focal point of the protests against the controversial Stuttgart 21.


title: Stuttgart

text: Since shortly after the end of World War II, there has been a US military presence in Stuttgart. At the height of the Cold War over 45,000 Americans were stationed across over 40 installations in and around the city. Today about 10,000 Americans are stationed on 5 installations (Patch Barracks, Panzer Kaserne, Kelley Barracks, Robinson Barracks, and Stuttgart Army Airfield) representing all branches of service within the Department of Defense, unlike the mostly Army presence of the Occupation and Cold War.


title: Stuttgart

text: In March 1946 the US Army established a unit of the US Constabulary and a headquarters at Kurmärker Kaserne (later renamed Patch Barracks) in Stuttgart. These units of soldiers retrained in patrol and policing provided the law and order in the American zone of occupied Germany until the civilian German police forces could be re-established. In 1948 the headquarters for all Constabulary forces was moved to Stuttgart. In 2008 a memorial to the US Constabulary was installed and dedicated at Patch Barracks. The US Constabulary headquarters was disbanded in 1950 and most of the force was merged into the newly organized 7th Army. As the Cold War developed US Army VII Corps was re-formed in July 1950 and assigned to Hellenen Kaserne (renamed Kelley Barracks in 1951) where the headquarters was to remain throughout the Cold War.


title: Stuttgart

text: In 1990 VII Corps was deployed directly from Germany to Saudi Arabia for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm to include many of the VII Corps troops stationed in and around Stuttgart. After returning from the Middle East, the bulk of VII Corps units were reassigned to the United States or deactivated. The VII Corps Headquarters returned to Germany for a short period to close out operations and was deactivated later in the United States. The withdrawal of VII Corps caused a large reduction in the US military presence in the city and region and led to the closure of the majority of US installations in and around Stuttgart which resulted in the layoff of many local civilians who had been career employees of the US Army.


title: Stuttgart

text: Since 1967, Patch Barracks in Stuttgart has been home to the US EUCOM. In 2007 AFRICOM was established as a cell within EUCOM and in 2008 established as the US Unified Combatant Command responsible for most of Africa headquartered at Kelley Barracks. Due to these 2 major headquarters, Stuttgart has been identified as one of the few "enduring communities" where the United States forces will continue to operate in Germany. The remaining U.S. bases around Stuttgart are organized into US Army Garrison Stuttgart and include Patch Barracks, Robinson Barracks, Panzer Kaserne and Kelley Barracks. From the end of World War II until the early 1990s these installations excepting Patch were almost exclusively Army, but have become increasingly "Purple"—as in joint service—since the end of the Cold War as they are host to United States Department of Defense Unified Commands and supporting activities.


title: Stuttgart

text: The core area of Stuttgart lies in a fertile bowl-shaped valley about above sea level, an hour from the Black Forest and Swabian Jura on the banks of the Neckar river at to the west and north of Munich. The city is often described as being ""zwischen Wald und Reben"", or "between forest and vines" because of its viticulture and surrounding forests.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart covers an area of and sits at elevation ranging from above sea level by the Neckar river to on Bernhartshöhe hill – something rather unique in large German cities. The most prominent elevated locales in Stuttgart are the Birkenkopf () on the edge of the Stuttgart basin, the Württemberg () rising above the Neckar valley, and the Grüner Heiner () at the northeast end of the city.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is one of 14 regional centers in Baden-Württemberg and is naturally the primary centre of the Stuttgart Region, making it the administrative centre for a region of containing a total of 2.76 million people as of December 2014. In addition, Stuttgart serves as a Mittelzentrum for Esslingen District cities Leinfelden-Echterdingen and Filderstadt as well as Ditzingen, Gerlingen, and Korntal-Münchingen in Ludwigsburg District. Stuttgart is also chief of the three centres Stuttgart Metropolitan Region, an area of containing 5.3 million persons.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart experiences an oceanic climate (Köppen: "Cfb"), just like the British Isles and Northern France, but it is very extreme at times. As a result of the urban heat island caused by the dense development of the city, inside its "Cauldron" average temperatures in the summer months regularly beat from June to August and come very near in September. In the winter temperatures are quite mild, with daily means never sinking below even in the coldest months (January and February). In spite of the heat, there is no dry season and the city receives frequent but moderate precipitation year-round. Annually, the city receives average of rain (German average national annual rainfall is ). On average, Stuttgart enjoys 1,807 hours of sunshine per year and an average annual temperature of .


title: Stuttgart

text: Typically during summer months, the nearby hills, Swabian Alb mountains, and Black Forest, Schurwald, and Swabian-Franconian Forest act as a shield from harsh weather but the city can be subject to thunderstorms, whereas in the winter periods snow may last for several days. Winters last from December to March. The coldest month is January with an average temperature of . Snow cover tends to last no longer than a few days although it has been known to last several weeks at a time as recently as 2010. The summers are warm with an average temperature of in the hottest months of July and August. Summers last from May until September. Though it is a rare occurrence in Stuttgart, the city sometimes receives damaging hailstorms, such as in July 2013. In order to fight this phenomenon, weather stations known as ""Hagelflieger"" are stationed near the city and are largely funded by Daimler AG, who maintain several parking lots and factories in the municipal area.


title: Stuttgart

text: At the center of Stuttgart lies its main square, Schlossplatz. As well as being the largest square in Stuttgart, it stands at the crossover point between the city's shopping area, "Schlossgarten" park which runs down to the river Neckar, Stuttgart's two central castles and major museums and residential areas to the south west. Königstraße, Stuttgart's most important shopping street which runs along the northwestern edge of Schlossplatz, claims to be the longest pedestrianized street in Germany.


title: Stuttgart

text: Although the city center was heavily damaged during World War II, many historic buildings have been reconstructed and the city boasts some fine pieces of modern post-war architecture. Buildings and squares of note in the inner city include:


title: Stuttgart

text: A number of significant castles stand in Stuttgart's suburbs and beyond as reminders of the city's royal past. These include:


title: Stuttgart

text: At the center of Stuttgart lies a series of gardens which are popular with families and cyclists. Because of its shape on a map, the locals refer to it as the "Green U". The Green U starts with the old Schlossgarten, castle gardens first mentioned in records in 1350. The modern park stretches down to the river Neckar and is divided into the upper garden (bordering the Old Castle, the Main Station, the State Theater and the State Parliament building), and the middle and lower gardens – a total of 61 hectares. The park also houses Stuttgart planetarium.


title: Stuttgart

text: At the far end of Schlossgarten lies the second "Green U" park, the larger Rosensteinpark which borders Stuttgart's Wilhelma zoo and botanical gardens. Planted by King William I of Württemberg, it contains many old trees and open areas and counts as the largest English-style garden in southern Germany. In the grounds of the park stands the former Rosenstein castle, now the Rosenstein museum.


title: Stuttgart

text: Beyond bridges over an adjacent main road lies the final "Green U" park, Killesbergpark or 'Höhenpark' which is a former quarry that was converted for the Third Reich garden show of 1939 (and was used as a collection point for Jews awaiting transportation to concentration camps). The park has been used to stage many gardening shows since the 1950s, including the Bundesgartenschau and 1993 International Gardening Show, and runs miniature trains all around the park in the summer months for children and adults. The viewing tower (Killesbergturm) offers unique views across to the north east of Stuttgart.


title: Stuttgart

text: On the northern edge of the Rosensteinpark is the famous 'Wilhelma', Germany's only combined zoological and botanical garden. The whole compound, with its ornate pavilions, greenhouses, walls and gardens was built around 1850 as a summer palace in moorish style for King Wilhelm I of Württemberg. It currently houses around 8000 animals and some 5000 plant species and contains the biggest magnolia grove in Europe.


title: Stuttgart

text: Other parks in Stuttgart include the historic Botanischer Garten der Universität Hohenheim and Landesarboretum Baden-Württemberg at Castle Hohenheim (which date back to 1776 and are still used to catalog and research plant species), Uhlandshöhe hill (between the city center, Bad Cannstatt and Frauenkopf, and home to Stuttgart observatory), the Weißenburgpark (a five-hectare park in the Bopser area of Stuttgart South which dates back to 1834 and is now home to a 'tea house' and the 'marble room' and offers a relaxing view across the city center), the Birkenkopf a Schuttberg (at the highest point in central Stuttgart, where many ruins were laid to commemorate the Second World War), and the Eichenhain park in Sillenbuch (declared a nature reserve in 1958 and home to 200 oak trees, many 300–400 years old).


title: Stuttgart

text: There are a number of natural and artificial lakes and ponds in Stuttgart. The largest is the Max-Eyth-See, which was created in 1935 by reclaiming a former quarry and is now an official nature reserve. It is surrounded by an expansive open area overlooked by vineyards on the banks of the river Neckar near [Mühlhausen].


title: Stuttgart

text: There are expansive areas of woodland to the west and south west of Stuttgart which are popular with walkers, families, cyclists and ramblers. The most frequented lakes form a trio made up of the Bärensee, Neuer See and Pfaffensee. The lakes are also used for local water supplies.


title: Stuttgart

text: In the Feuersee area in the west of Stuttgart lies one of two 'Feuersee's (literally fire lakes), striking for its views of the Johanneskirche (St. Johns) church across the lake, surrounded by nearby houses and offices. The other Feuersee can be found in Vaihingen.


title: Stuttgart

text: The city boasts the second-largest mineral water deposits in Europe after Budapest, with over 250 springs within the urban area. The Athenebrunnen (or Fountain of Pallas Athena) is along Jean-Amery-Weg in the western part of Stuttgart, dating from 1911.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is known for its rich cultural heritage, in particular its State Theatre ("Staatstheater") and State Gallery ("Staatsgalerie"). The "Staatstheater" is home to the State opera and three smaller theatres. It regularly stages opera, ballet and theatre productions as well as concerts. The Staatstheater was named Germany/Austria/Switzerland "Theatre of the year" in 2006; the Stuttgart Opera has won the 'Opera of the year' award six times. Stuttgart Ballet is connected to names like John Cranko and Marcia Haydée.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is also home to one of Germany's most prestigious symphony orchestras, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, with famous English conductor Sir Roger Norrington, who developed a distinct sound of that orchestra, known as the "Stuttgart Sound". They mostly perform in the "Liederhalle" concert hall.


title: Stuttgart

text: The city offers two Broadway-style musical theatres, the Apollo and the Palladium Theater (each approx. 1800 seats). Ludwigsburg Palace in the nearby town of Ludwigsburg is also used throughout the year as a venue for concerts and cultural events.


title: Stuttgart

text: As a result of Stuttgart's long history of viticulture (Even today there are vineyards less than from the Main Station), there are more than 400 flights of stairs (known in the local dialect as the ""Stäffele"") around the city, equivalent to approximately of steps. Later, in the early 19th Century, the city continued to grow and many vineyards were replaced by houses and streets and the "Stäffele" were used as footpaths to connect the newly built neighborhoods. Some of the stairs were elaborately decorated with fountains and plantings.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Schleyerhalle sports arena is regularly used to stage rock and pop concerts with major international stars on European tour.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart's Swabian cuisine, beer and wine have been produced in the area since the 17th century and are now famous throughout Germany and beyond. For example, Gaisburger Marsch is a stew that was invented in Stuttgart's Gaisburg area of Stuttgart East.


title: Stuttgart

text: In October 2009 the Stuttgart Ministry of Agriculture announced that the European Union was to officially recognise the pasta dish Maultaschen as a "regional specialty", thus marking its significance to the cultural heritage of Baden-Württemberg.


title: Stuttgart

text: In 1993 Stuttgart hosted the International Garden Show in the suburb of Killesberg. In 2006 it was also one of the host cities of the Football World Cup. In 2007, Stuttgart hosted the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. In 2008 it was host to the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championships. In 2015, Stuttgart hosted the Protestant Kirchentag (church convention) festival, a festival that takes place in a different German city every two years.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is home to five of the eleven state museums in Baden-Württemberg. The foremost of these is the Old State Gallery (opened in 1843, extended in 1984) which holds art dating from the 14th to 19th century including works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Beuys. Next door to the Old State Gallery is the New State Gallery (1980) with its controversial modern architecture. Among others, this gallery houses works from Max Beckmann, Dalí, Matisse, Miró, Picasso, Klee, Chagall and Kandinsky.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Old Castle is also home to the State Museum of Württemberg which was founded in 1862 by William I of Württemberg. The museum traces the rich history of Württemberg with many artifacts from its dukes, counts and kings, as well as earlier remnants dating back to the Stone Age. On the Karlsplatz side of the Old Castle is a museum dedicated to the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, former resident of Stuttgart who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944.


title: Stuttgart

text: Stuttgart is the seat of a Protestant bishop (Protestant State Church in Württemberg) and one of the two co-seats of the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart. The Stuttgart-based Pentecostal "Gospel Forum" is the largest place of worship (megachurch) in Germany. It is also home to a large English speaking church, The International Baptist Church of Stuttgart.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Württembergische Landesbibliothek (WLB) is one of two state libraries for Baden-Württemberg. The WLB is specifically responsible for the administrative regions of Stuttgart and Tübingen. Especially devoted to the National Library of acquiring, cataloging, archiving and provision of literature about Württemberg, called "Württembergica". Together with the Badische Landesbibliothek (BLB) in Karlsruhe it also has the legal deposit for Baden-Württemberg, making it an archive library.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Stuttgart University Library (UBS) is a central institution of the University of Stuttgart . It forms the center of the library system of the university, ensuring the supply of research, teaching and studies with literature and other information resources. It stands next to the members of the university and citizens of the city are available. Together with other research libraries and documentation centers in the Stuttgart area – such as the University of Hohenheim Library – it forms the UBS Library Information System of the Stuttgart Region (BISS).


title: Stuttgart

text: The Central State Archive Stuttgart is the archive in charge of the Ministries of the State of Baden-Württemberg. Since 1965, it is located right next to the WLB and belongs since 2005 as a department of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg in. It includes the stocks of the county and the duchy Württemberg until 1806, the Württemberg central authorities of the 19th and 20th century and the early 19th century as a result of media coverage of fallen Württemberg gentlemen and imperial cities in South Württemberg.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Stadtarchiv Stuttgart is the archive in charge of the provincial capital Stuttgart. The archived material is in principle open to the public and can be consulted in the reading room in Bellingweg 21 in Bad Cannstatt.


title: Stuttgart

text: The Landeskirchliche Archives preserve the stocks of the Württemberg church leaders and of other ecclesial bodies and institutions: the ducal and royal Württemberg consistory, the Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council, deanery and parish archives, educational institutions, the works and associations as well as estates and collections. It also has the microfilms of all church books (especially baptism, marriage, and family Death's Register) in the area of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg.