[Music]
[Applause]
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
sized 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 as 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 a 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
so 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 100 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 predators
paradise a very strange place probably
his most important discovery was that of
a large predatory dinosaur he called
Spinosaurus it’s an animal is probably
larger than t-rex with a big sail on its
back some of these spines are as tall
a person it was an incredible find it
was incomplete the dark bones on this
image are the ones that Homer had found
but it became the centerpiece of the
dinosaur exhibit in the Munich Museum
West Homer worked so his career was
going well but things changed in World
War two sheet OVA who was a 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
schwimmer also lost two of his three
sons in the war Arthur drafted into the
Army including the youngest one in the
middle jihad 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 and this
part of the world there are about 100
million years old about the same age as
the rocks that Homer was was working in
in Egypt my fieldwork did not take me to
Egypt it took me to the border region
between Morocco and Algeria
a place called the chemcam 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 is 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
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’re finding belong to predators
t-rex sized predators medium-sized
predatory dinosaurs and crocodile like
hunters in all shapes and size
so Schwimmer was right North Africa and
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’re 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 as
an 18-foot wingspan so we had found this
incredible ecosystem but really only
bits and pieces of Spinosaurus and that
there was the one that I really really
really wanted to find but things changed
in early 2008 we’re just coming back
from the field and we stopped in a city
called her food 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 he was kind of difficult to
tell what exactly we were looking at and
he asked me you know what you think
these are and 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’d
never seen anything like this I thought
you know 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 Casablanca
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
it’s no other dinosaur has spines like
this a foot that was almost complete
we’re 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 the 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 belong to the same animal
maybe they found hundreds of kilometers
apart so there 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 her food 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
that 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 travelled 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 we going to find this guy
and you know like you have a name or an
address or you know 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 her food so I told him well he had a
mustache and I’m paraphrasing what Samir
said next but basically he was saying
something I’m along the lines of that’s
not an adequate starting point for our
search
but we tried anyway we travel to many
different places we went to places where
people were digging tunnels into the
rock looking for dinosaur bones we’re
looking at places where local fossil
hunters were you know selling things but
we couldn’t find the guy we couldn’t
find out anything about the skeleton and
so you know we went back to her food it
was the last day of our search and I was
just getting ready to give up throw in
the towel
so we’re sitting in this in this you
know cafe in our food 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 this
person walks past our table I’m not
kidding you at that very moment and and
I look at the man’s face and a 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 I’m
not letting you go before you tell me
where you found this and so he agreed
and here’s what happened next the man
agrees finally to take bazaar to the
site where the fossils were pulled from
the
after nearly an hour drive most of it
off-road and a 30-minute trek up the
side of a mountain the dealer leads
nazar to a nondescript looking hole in a
outside
within minutes in the fill surrounding
the dig site they discover fragments of
bones and teeth all but certainly
spinosaurus this is amazing I mean this
will take some time to sink in but this
is amazing it feels really surreal
calm down knees are 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 I’m thinking about the odds
they 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 we knew all the
bones came from one place and we can put
the skeleton together we did it the
modern way with CT scan all of the bones
and build 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 it was largely carried out
by Tyler Keeler 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 Roma
had found over 100 years ago
looks like whale or something it’s the
truly bizarre creature I’m going to
touch on this very briefly because this
is the 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 homas lost giant we’re
looking at the first aquatic dinosaur
it’s a truly amazing creature this piece
of artwork was and all the other artwork
you saw on this talk is the work of
David Urbana Donna my Italian dinosaur
illustrator the Michelangelo of dinosaur
illustrations and this really shows you
what this river of giants look 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 is really this
encapsulate everything that that
Spinosaurus was about it’s the first
aquatic dinosaur
it’s bigger than t-rex it’s you know the
story is just so rich it was an amazing
experience for me and I’m German
Moroccan I mean and this is German
Moroccan sign story you know what are
the odds but then you know I don’t need
to tell you anything about that so 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 and 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
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
Oh
[Applause]
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
sized 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 as 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 a 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
so 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 100 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 predators
paradise a very strange place probably
his most important discovery was that of
a large predatory dinosaur he called
Spinosaurus it’s an animal is probably
larger than t-rex with a big sail on its
back some of these spines are as tall
a person it was an incredible find it
was incomplete the dark bones on this
image are the ones that Homer had found
but it became the centerpiece of the
dinosaur exhibit in the Munich Museum
West Homer worked so his career was
going well but things changed in World
War two sheet OVA who was a 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
schwimmer also lost two of his three
sons in the war Arthur drafted into the
Army including the youngest one in the
middle jihad 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 and this
part of the world there are about 100
million years old about the same age as
the rocks that Homer was was working in
in Egypt my fieldwork did not take me to
Egypt it took me to the border region
between Morocco and Algeria
a place called the chemcam 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 is 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
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’re finding belong to predators
t-rex sized predators medium-sized
predatory dinosaurs and crocodile like
hunters in all shapes and size
so Schwimmer was right North Africa and
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’re 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 as
an 18-foot wingspan so we had found this
incredible ecosystem but really only
bits and pieces of Spinosaurus and that
there was the one that I really really
really wanted to find but things changed
in early 2008 we’re just coming back
from the field and we stopped in a city
called her food 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 he was kind of difficult to
tell what exactly we were looking at and
he asked me you know what you think
these are and 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’d
never seen anything like this I thought
you know 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 Casablanca
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
it’s no other dinosaur has spines like
this a foot that was almost complete
we’re 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 the 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 belong to the same animal
maybe they found hundreds of kilometers
apart so there 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 her food 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
that 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 travelled 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 we going to find this guy
and you know like you have a name or an
address or you know 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 her food so I told him well he had a
mustache and I’m paraphrasing what Samir
said next but basically he was saying
something I’m along the lines of that’s
not an adequate starting point for our
search
but we tried anyway we travel to many
different places we went to places where
people were digging tunnels into the
rock looking for dinosaur bones we’re
looking at places where local fossil
hunters were you know selling things but
we couldn’t find the guy we couldn’t
find out anything about the skeleton and
so you know we went back to her food it
was the last day of our search and I was
just getting ready to give up throw in
the towel
so we’re sitting in this in this you
know cafe in our food 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 this
person walks past our table I’m not
kidding you at that very moment and and
I look at the man’s face and a 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 I’m
not letting you go before you tell me
where you found this and so he agreed
and here’s what happened next the man
agrees finally to take bazaar to the
site where the fossils were pulled from
the
after nearly an hour drive most of it
off-road and a 30-minute trek up the
side of a mountain the dealer leads
nazar to a nondescript looking hole in a
outside
within minutes in the fill surrounding
the dig site they discover fragments of
bones and teeth all but certainly
spinosaurus this is amazing I mean this
will take some time to sink in but this
is amazing it feels really surreal
calm down knees are 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 I’m thinking about the odds
they 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 we knew all the
bones came from one place and we can put
the skeleton together we did it the
modern way with CT scan all of the bones
and build 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 it was largely carried out
by Tyler Keeler 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 Roma
had found over 100 years ago
looks like whale or something it’s the
truly bizarre creature I’m going to
touch on this very briefly because this
is the 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 homas lost giant we’re
looking at the first aquatic dinosaur
it’s a truly amazing creature this piece
of artwork was and all the other artwork
you saw on this talk is the work of
David Urbana Donna my Italian dinosaur
illustrator the Michelangelo of dinosaur
illustrations and this really shows you
what this river of giants look 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 is really this
encapsulate everything that that
Spinosaurus was about it’s the first
aquatic dinosaur
it’s bigger than t-rex it’s you know the
story is just so rich it was an amazing
experience for me and I’m German
Moroccan I mean and this is German
Moroccan sign story you know what are
the odds but then you know I don’t need
to tell you anything about that so 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 and 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
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
Oh
Please follow and like us: