Lost and Found, continued
hunters followed in the footsteps of Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach,
who discovered four species of dinosaurs in excavations 1911-1914.
The most famous was Spinosaurus, whose partial skeleton is
shown mounted in a newly discovered photo (left). It and all of Stromer's
specimens were destroyed in World War II.
Every new dinosaur paleontologist knows the story of Stromers lost
dinosaurs inside and out. Its become a legend, says Josh, who names
Spinosaurus as his favorite dinosaur when he was growing up, just because
it got ignored.
Stromer made his first visit to the
Bahariya Oasis in 1911, and in three seasons of excavating discovered
40-50 genera of plant and animal organisms, including seven or eight
dinosaur genera and a host of other taxaturtles, crocodiles, more than
20 genera of fish, Smith says. The fossils Stromer excavated were from
a rock unit called the Bahariya Formation that was about 100 million years
old, in the Cretaceous era (144-65 million years ago). That was about
the time the dinosaurs were really starting to get their steam going,
Smith explains, as rising sea levels turned what had been a single land
mass into isolated continents, leading to more divergent evolutionary
paths in different parts of the world.
Separated from his collecting possibilities
by the coming of the first world war, Stromer concentrated on describing
the material he had managed to bring out of Egypt. With the exception
of some small specimens that curators had surreptitiously removed for
safekeeping before the bombs fell, those descriptions were thought to
be all that remained of Stromers discoveries. For whatever reason, nobody
really went back to Egypt to search for dinosaurs after World War II,
says Smith. This despite the fact that these critters were just bizarrely
spectacular animalsnot only did [Stromer] find lots of animals but they
were all weird.
Stromers other finds include two more large carnivores: Carcharodontosaurus,
an animal with a skull six-feet long, equipped with very powerful blade-like
teeth (carcharodon is the name of a giant shark); and Bahariasaurus,
about which much less is known, but which has a femur the size of T. rex.
In addition to these predators, Stromer also discovered a smaller plant-eating
dinosaur, or sauropod, that he named Aegyptosaurus.
Oasis had also scored exceptionally highfive out of fiveon a scale devised
by another EES graduate student, Matthew Lamanna, to analyze where major
new dinosaur discoveries could potentially be made. Bahariya was the
only place I could think of where we knew one could produce various spectacular
dinosaursbut that no longer existed, having been blown up in World War
II, he says. It was a pipe dream.
The chance to spend
some time searching for Stromers lost dinosaursafter some negotiating,
Jen and Josh settled on three daysprovided an acceptable rationale for
Josh to make the trip, but no one had very high expectations. I was kind
of, not blowing that aspect off, but [my attitude] was, Well, this will
justify him going, recalls Jen. And we went out there and in a matter
of hours there were bones all over the place. It was absolutely amazing.
While Stromer had left no maps or known photographs of his sites, he had
made notes about the places he excavated. We took the descriptions of
his landforms, translated them and then drove around in the desert looking
for stuff that matched, says Josh. For a variety of reasonsnot least
that 85 years had passedthis method was probably the dumbest way we
could have gone about it, but we got really lucky. About 45 minutes
into the drive on the first morning, Im hanging my head out of the car
window at 30 miles an hour and I see a bone about 10 inches in diameter
and a foot long. A few more bones lay on the surface nearby. From their
size and the fact that they were not hollow, Josh judged that the bones
probably belonged to a large sauropodone of the long-necked, long-tailed
guys. By the end of the day, they had found 20 accumulations of bones.
It was a great day, Josh recalls. The bone density was phenomenal.
results of the initial reconnaissance
clearly warranted a full-scale expedition to continue the search for Stromers
original sites and to follow up on Joshs own discoveries. But how to
pay for it?
question started to get answered one night back in Philadelphia, when
Smith met R. Scott Winters Gr01, then a Ph.D. candidate in biology, for
drinks at the New Deck Tavern and began talking about his trip to Egypt.
Josh and I had been old friends and Ive known Peter [Dodson] for years
and have an interest in paleontology, Winters says.
Winters, who is not your ordinary graduate student, had a more-than- curious
interest in Smiths story. While his research interests are primarily
in theoretical biology, using techniques from computer science and mathematics
to look at computationally intensive problems in ecology, he also has
a longtime involvement in the exploration community, writing articles
and editing an online newsletter for the Explorers Club, an international
organization founded in 1904 to promote field research and scientific
to the point, Winters is partner in a film production company that specializes
in science- and expedition-based documentaries, and he thought Joshs
story had definite possibilities. The fact that Josh had made such major
finds in just three days was an excellent story in and of itself. Add
the compelling Stromer back-storyYou know, that [Josh] possibly had
gone back to the same siteand selling the package as a documentary was
practically a slam-dunk, he says. I asked Josh if I could get a little
bit more involved in the project and could possibly get him funding, and
he certainly was amenable to that. Quite literally, after I left the New
Deck I pulled out my cell phone and made a couple of calls.
a few weeks, Winters was able to negotiate a deal whereby another company,
Los Angeles-based, MPH Entertainment, would provide $50,000 to fund the
projects first field season in January-February 2000 in return for the
rights to make a documentary about it in association with Winters company,
Last Word Productions. This spring, the film rights were sold to Cosmos
Studios. The two-hour documentary will premiere on the A&E Network
in late 2001 or early 2002, with the title The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt.
In addition, it will be shown at the Jackson Hole Film Festival in
the funding from MPH in hand, says Josh, We got 21 people together, and
we trucked them across the pond and dumped them in the middle of the desert
for six weeks, and we excavated like fiends.
Josh as leader, Peter Dodson, Matt Lamanna, Jennifer Smith, and Kenneth
Lacovera, a sedimentologist from Drexel University, created the Bahariya
Dinosaur Project (BDP). They formed the core of the field-expedition team,
which also included Jason Poole, chief fossil preparator at the Academy
of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and several volunteers. The film
crew made up the rest of the 21-person total, including MPH Entertainment
partner and documentary-director Jim Milio, a veteran of the syndicated
television series Rescue 911 and other projects, and Vladimir Perlovich,
a television and film producer who is Winters partner in Last Word.
the help of Bob Giegengacks network of contacts made during three decades
of working as a geologist in Egypt, the BDP formed a partnership with
the Cairo Geological Museum and the Egyptian Geological Survey and Mining
Authority giving them exclusive rights to excavate in the Bahariya Oasis
for five years. In an unusually liberal provision of the agreement, half
of the fossils excavated will come to Philadelphia and the other half
stay in Cairo. (By contrast, in a dinosaur project in Argentina in which
Penn is a partner, the fossils cannot leave the country even to be studied.)
showing location of the Bahariya Oasis and the site of the Paralititan
discovery (below) and Gebel el Dist, the most prominent feature
on the nearby landscape (above).