Nizar Ibrahim: Lost Giant of the Sahara

All right, so I'm going to take you on a journey back in time to the Cretaceous Period. Now, you might say, “Well, I know what life was like in the Cretaceous. That's when T. rex was roaming North America.” Well, I'll take you to a very different kind of place. I'll take you to a lost world, an African river of giants, a place that did not just have one T. rex size predator, but three. A place that was home to a bizarre creature that is going to force paleontologists to rethink many things they thought they knew about dinosaurs.

Now, before we travel back to the Cretaceous, we'll just travel back to my childhood. This is how it all started. I always loved animals, living and extinct. So I was equally happy handling live snakes on summer holidays, and practicing my dinosaur talks in my grandmother's garden in Germany. I should add that my grandmother had no problem whatsoever with the dinosaur part, but she has a deep-seated fear of snakes and crocodiles. So, needless to say that at least from her point of view, things did not really get any better as I got older.

But, I wasn't just interested in animals. I also really liked traveling, and one place I really wanted to visit was the Sahara Desert, not just because it's a beautiful place, but also because I was inspired by the discoveries of a German paleontologist who over a hundred years ago made some incredible discoveries in the sands of Egypt. He found Egypt's first dinosaurs, and he did not just describe dinosaur fossils. He described crocodiles and an entire ecosystem really, a predator's paradise, a very strange place. Probably his most important discovery was that of a large predatory dinosaur he called Spinosaurus. It's an animal that was probably larger than T. rex with a big sail on its back. Some of these spines are as tall as a person. It was an incredible find. It was incomplete. The dark bones on this image are the ones that Stromer had found, but it became the centerpiece of the dinosaur exhibit in the Munich Museum where Stromer worked.

So his career was going well, but things changed in World War II. Stromer who was an outspoken critic of the Nazi dictatorship lost a lot. He lost most of his scientific finds when an Allied air raid destroyed the Munich Museum. Spinosaurus was also destroyed, and seemingly lost forever. All we have are just a few drawings. Stromer also lost two of his three sons in the war after they were drafted into the army including the youngest one in the middle, Gerhard, who died just two weeks before the end of the war in Germany.

So I was fascinated by this dramatic story, and by his discovery of Spinosaurus. So, in my early 20s, I decided to start a series of expeditions to the Sahara to explore the Cretaceous rocks in this part of the world. They're about 100 million years old. About the same age as the rocks that Stromer was working in in Egypt. My field work did not take me to Egypt. It took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. It's a beautiful place, and I decided to collect everything I could find in that environment, crocodiles, flying reptiles, turtles, you name it.

This here's a skull piece from a crocodile. I really wanted to understand the entire ecosystem, and it's hard work. Most of the fossils are found along this escarpment so there's a lot of climbing involved, and it's really hard to find good fossils. But we found thousands of really interesting specimens including this one here. It's the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. I found that on my second expedition. It's a remarkable piece not so much because it's so big. It's the upper arm bone of a large plant-eating dinosaur, but because it belongs to a plant-eating animal. Because the vast majority of the fossils we are finding belong to predators, T. rex sized predators, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and crocodile-like hunters in all shapes and sizes.

So Stromer was right. North Africa in the Cretaceous was a predators paradise. One thing we noticed was that the skulls of all these predatory animals were really different. So it appears that they were eating different things and that may have helped them to coexist in the same place. The rivers were not just home to these giant crocodile-like creatures. We also have a car-sized coelacanth, a giant sawfish, and even the skies were filled with predators. This is the largest flying creature ever described from Africa. We described it in 2010, has an 18-foot wingspan. So we had found this incredible ecosystem, but really only bits and pieces of Spinosaurus, and that was the one that I really, really, really wanted to find. But things changed in early 2008. We were just coming back from the field, and we stopped in a city called Erfoud on the edge of the Sahara Desert. It's a fairly large place, and a man approached me and my colleagues and he had a cardboard box with fossils. They were covered in sediment. It was kind of difficult to tell what exactly we were looking at, and he asked me, “What do you think these are?” It was really difficult to tell, but one piece really caught my attention. It was a blade-shaped section of bone not very long, but it had a really strange cross section. You can see the cross section is the white, creamy part of the bone, and it's divided in two with this big red line in the middle. I had never seen anything like this. I thought maybe this is a rib, but maybe this is a part of a spine of Spinosaurus. Who knows? I thought these are important specimens so I made sure that they were brought to the University of Casa Blanca in Morocco, and I thought maybe one day I'll be able to figure out what this is.

Well, that day came sooner than I expected. Two Italian colleagues of mine told me that a partial skeleton of a dinosaur that had been spirited out of North Africa apparently Morocco, had gone through several hands and, you know, had somehow ended up in Italy, and, you know, they said I should have a look at it. So when I came to Italy, I looked at the bones and my jaw dropped. Tall spines. No other dinosaur has spines like this. A foot that was almost complete. We are looking at the first Spinosaurus skeleton that had been found in over a hundred years. But there was one big problem. My Italian colleagues didn't know where this skeleton came from, and that's a huge problem in paleontology. It means you have no geological context. You don't know anything about the environment the animal lived in, but worst of all you can't even prove that all these bones were found in the same place and belonged to the same animal. Maybe they were found hundreds of kilometers apart. So that was a big problem. But then I looked at the cross section of the spines and saw something very familiar. See the line that's dividing the spines in cross section? I thought that looks a lot like this bone I had seen in Erfoud and my mind just started racing. I thought so those bones belong to Spinosaurus, but the size, shape, and color of these bones and the ones I'd seen in Morocco were so similar I started wondering maybe this is actually the same skeleton.

It was a long shot, but I thought if this is the same skeleton then all I need to do is to find this one man in the Sahara Desert ask him to share confidential information with me, and show me where he found the skeleton, and voila. It was a crazy idea and I knew it was a crazy idea, but I traveled back to Morocco and I talked to my Moroccan colleague, Samir, and he said, “Okay, how are we going to find this guy?” I mean he knows I'm crazy, but I mean he was like “How are we going to find this guy? Do you have a name, or an address, or phone number? Anything?” But all I had was just this mental image of this man I had seen several years earlier for a few minutes in Erfoud. So I told him, “Well, he had a mustache.” And I'm paraphrasing what Samir said next. But basically he was saying something along the lines of that's not an adequate starting point for our search. But we tried anyway.

We traveled to many different places. We went to places where people were digging tunnels into the rock looking for dinosaur bones. We were looking at places where local fossil hunters were selling things. But we couldn't find the guy. We couldn't find out anything about this skeleton, and so, you know, we went back to Erfoud. It was the last day of our search, and I was just getting ready to give up, throw in the towel. So we were sitting in this cafe in Erfoud sipping mint tea, and I'm just thinking, you know, that's it. You know, I'll probably have to give up. It was a crazy idea. It was like looking for a needle, not in a haystack. That would be easy. I was looking for a needle in the Sahara, one man. So, and just at that moment when I was at my lowest point and ready to give up, this person walks past our table. I'm not kidding you. At that very moment, and I looked at the man's face, and I look at Samir, and I look back at the man, and he's walking fast, and we run down the street and catch up with him, and it was the man I was looking for. So, I couldn't really believe my luck. The next part, convincing him to share his field site with us was the easy part. Had never been done before, but I was like, I'm not letting you go before you tell me where you found this.

So he agreed, and here's what happened next. The man agrees finally to take Nizar to the site where the fossils were pulled from the ground. After nearly an hour drive, most of it off-road, and a 30 minute trek up the side of a mountain, the dealer leads Nizar to a nondescript looking hole in a hillside. Within minutes, in the fill surrounding the dig site, they discover fragments of bones and teeth, all but certainly Spinosaurus. I mean this will take some time to sink in, but this is amazing. It feels really surreal.

Calm down, Nizar, but it still feels surreal. It still feels surreal to this day, and it was amazing. We found our needle in the Sahara. I'm glad I'm not a statistician and thinking about the odds that were stacked against us. You know, I just thought we'll try. So we found the site. We found more bones of the same animal, and we had beautiful geology all around us so we had all the information we wanted. So now we knew all the bones came from one place, and we can put the skeleton together. We did it the modern way. We CT scanned all of the bones, and built a digital dinosaur filling in missing parts with information we had from other Spinosaurus bones, isolated pieces I had seen in museum collections.

This is work that was largely carried out by Tyler Keillor. When we put the entire skeleton together, we realized that we were looking at something that looked unlike any other dinosaur ever found. Look at those proportions. It's a truly bizarre animal. And we also realized that it was very big. We actually mounted it at life size, and because that's more impressive than a CGI model, I'll show you our skeleton. It's an incredible creature. Look at that skull, a long neck, and you'll see the big spines that Stromer had found over a hundred years ago. Looks like a whale or something. It's a truly bizarre creature.

I'm going to touch on this very briefly because this is still ongoing work, but the biology of this dinosaur is very, very interesting. We have a lot of really bizarre adaptations in this creature, not just the big sail. We have a nose opening that's pushed back on the skull, further back than in any other dinosaur. We have paddle-like feet, hind limbs that are really short. Those are all things that we see in aquatic animals. Even the bone structure of this dinosaur looks more like that of marine mammals than typical dinosaurs. And then we have these big powerful arms that may have been used to tackle large prey like the big Coelacanth you saw earlier on. The teeth are conical. The snout is just like that of a crocodile, perfect for snaring slippery prey. So it turns out that, you know, we had not only rediscovered Stromer's lost giant, we were looking at the first aquatic dinosaur. It's a truly amazing creature.

This piece of artwork, and all the other artwork you saw in this talk, is the work of Davide Bonadonna my Italian dinosaur illustrator, the Michelangelo of dinosaur illustrations. And this really shows you what this river of giants looked like, a place dominated by predators, giant fish, flying reptiles, and Spinosaurus, the ruler of this strange lost world. So, I will leave you with this beautiful image. You know, for me this encapsulates everything that Spinosaurus was about. It's the first aquatic dinosaur. It's bigger than T. rex. You know, the story is just so rich. It was an amazing experience for me, and I'm German Moroccan. I mean this is a German Moroccan science story. You know, what are the odds? But then, I don't need to tell you anything about that. So it was a truly amazing adventure, and I feel really privileged to have been a part of it.

So I will leave you with this beautiful image, and a promise that I will take you on many other journeys back in time to lost worlds that are more awe-inspiring, more thought-provoking, and more bizarre than we could possibly imagine. Thank you.