The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt Read online

  THE LOST

  DINOSAURS

  OF EGYPT

  WILLIAM NOTHDURFT

  WITH JOSH SMITH, MATT LAMANNA, KEN LACOVARA, JASON POOLE, AND JEN SMITH

  RANDOM HOUSE

  NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  FRONTISPIECE

  HALF TITLE

  PROLOGUE: Death and Resurrection

  ONE: Reaping the Whirlwind

  TWO: The Bone-Hunting Aristocrat

  THREE: Unearthing a Legend

  FOUR: Dragomen, Fossils, and Fleas

  FIVE: The Road to Bahariya

  SIX: Finds and Losses

  SEVEN: Sand, Wind, and Time

  EIGHT: The Hill Near Death

  NINE: Solving Stromer’s Riddle

  TEN: Lost World of the Lost Dinosaurs

  EPILOGUE: Memorials

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  THE LOST DINOSAURS OF EGYPT

  PROLOGUE

  DEATH AND RESURRECTION

  No one knows what brought the huge animal down. The life of a dinosaur had no shortage of perils. Even a dinosaur this big—more than 80 feet long and weighing perhaps 65 to 70 tons—was not immune. Something killed it: disease, injury, attack, possibly just old age. At some point its knees buckled and it dropped to the ground with a seismic thud, or perhaps a massive splash. It was almost certainly still alive at that moment—critically injured or racked with illness, perhaps, but still alive. Too weak to lift its head above the incoming tide, it may have drowned. It may have expired quietly, alone. It may have been surrounded by its fellow creatures, in much the same way elephants will gather around a stricken member of their herd. It may have been surrounded by far less sympathetic company. A predator, perhaps its attacker. Maybe more than one. The scent of death travels far. Ever opportunists, the predators may have begun dismembering the great animal while it was still struggling, still clinging to life.

  Eventually the beast lost its battle against death. Almost immediately thereafter, possibly even before, when they knew it was safe to approach, the scavengers arrived—by land and air, even water—and began tearing apart the carcass. Soft tissue left behind by the larger scavengers was consumed by smaller ones, insects and bacteria, gradually decomposing into the soil or water beneath. The dead sustain the living: conservation of energy and matter.

  In time, all that was left were the beast’s great bones, scattered now, no longer part of an intact skeleton. Mud and sand drifting in and out on the tide collected around its remains. The process was so gentle that it did not disturb the bones much and merely buried them.

  Bones are remarkably good at providing evidence of trouble, in both dinosaurs and humans. Bones preserve the signs of fractures and breaks even after they heal because the new material that fills in the cracks, called callus, is structurally different from the original. And even after new bone cells replace the callus, traces of the injury often remain. Disease can deform bones as well, twisting them, causing abnormal growths or altering their density or porosity. And the scars of tooth marks remain on bone even after predator and prey have been dead for tens of millions of years.

  But over those millions of years, the bones can change. Very gradually, minerals dissolved in water percolating through the soil—silicate, calcium carbonate, iron oxide, calcium sulfate, and others—can permeate the porous structure of bone, filling in around and in some cases actually replacing the organic material of which the bone is composed. In the case of this particular dinosaur, the result of thousands of years of this exquisitely slow process was a certain kind of immortality for the fallen giant. It had become a fossil.

  And that would normally be the end of the story. But in this case, it was just the beginning. On May 31, 2001, at a press conference in Philadelphia, the great beast was resurrected.

  That same day, the June 1 issue of the prestigious magazine Science was released. In it was an article formally describing “A Giant Sauropod Dinosaur from an Upper Cretaceous Mangrove Deposit in Egypt.” The article announced, in the typically arid prose of such journals:

  We describe a giant titanosaurid sauropod dinosaur discovered in coastal deposits in the Upper Cretaceous Bahariya Formation of Egypt, a unit that has produced three Tyrannosaurus-sized theropods and numerous other vertebrate taxa. Paralititan stromeri is the first tetrapod reported from Bahariya since 1935. Its 1.69-meter-long [about 66.5 inches] humerus is longer than any known Cretaceous sauropod. The autochthonous scavenged skeleton was preserved in mangrove deposits, raising the possibility that titanosaurids and their predators habitually entered such environments.1

  At the press conference, held on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Ann Druyan, founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, stepped to the microphone before a large group of reporters and television cameras. To her left were five young scientists. She introduced the young man closest to her and he came to the microphone.

  Josh Smith, a Penn doctoral candidate in paleontology, expressed his surprise at the number of reporters present and thanked them for coming. Then he told them a story. It was the story of a long forgotten German explorer and scientist who, almost a century earlier, had made not one but several astonishing dinosaur discoveries in, of all places, the Sahara Desert. It was a story about how the scientist lost them, and much more besides, through a series of crushingly tragic events.

  It was also the story of a group of young contemporary scientists who believed they could resurrect the German’s legacy and, at the same time, make a significant contribution to the world’s understanding of what the planet looked like nearly a hundred million years ago.

  In the Western Desert of Egypt in the winter of 2000, the group had succeeded, beyond their wildest imaginings, at both.

  Smith introduced the other members of the Bahariya Dinosaur Project team: fellow paleontology doctoral student Matthew Lamanna and geology doctoral student Jennifer Smith, both from the University of Pennsylvania; Drexel University professor of engineering geology Kenneth Lacovara; and Jason Poole, head of the fossil preparation laboratory at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. Smith also introduced two Penn faculty advisers who participated in the expedition: Dr. Robert Giegengack, experienced Egypt hand and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science; and from the School of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Peter Dodson, one of America’s best-regarded vertebrate paleontologists.

  Smith thanked three members of the team who were not present but whose participation had been critical to the success of the expedition: their Egyptian collaborators Yousry Attia, geologist and curator of the Egyptian Geological Museum, and Medhat Said Abdelghani and Yassir Abdelrazik, members of the museum’s paleontology staff.

  Then Smith introduced a bone.

  Between the group and the audience was a long, heavily reinforced table with a large object covered by a plain white sheet. Smith and Jason Poole stepped up to the table, removed the sheet, and revealed a reddish-brown dinosaur bone of stunning immensity. A murmur went around the room; camera lenses zoomed. Then came the questions. The press conference went into overtime. But one question in particular captured the moment:

  “So give us an idea of how big this animal was, say, compared to an elephant.”

  Matt Lamanna stepped to the microphone, laughing, and said: “This animal was as big as an entire herd of elephants.”

  The next day this lost dinosaur from Egypt was front-page news around the world. Josh Smith and Matt Lamanna would spend the next three weeks on the phone and in radio and television studios describing the great b
east and the expedition that discovered it.

  But as is so often the case, the media missed entirely the fact that the dinosaur, as big as it was, was only a small part of the story of the Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt.

  This is the whole story.

  ONE

  REAPING THE WHIRLWIND

  The second extinction of the dinosaurs from the Bahariya Oasis began shortly after midnight. It came from the sky. It began with a barely discernible disturbance in the air, a distant rumble that insinuated itself into the quiet of the night and quickly grew in intensity to a deafening roar. Then, suddenly, the sound became sight and the dark became light as the sky itself became fire. Moments later the roaring was punctuated by a stunning explosion that shattered the still night air. Then another. Then dozens more, until the earth shook and the ground split. Almost immediately, the sound and light became smell—the smell of burning, the singed stink of death. Screams rent the night, and soon the living became the dead.

  There have been roughly a dozen mass extinctions during the history of life on Earth, five of them so severe and all-encompassing that they killed off vast numbers of living things. One was so catastrophic that it came close to ending life altogether. Indeed, all of the species alive today represent only 1 percent of all the life that has ever lived during the Earth’s history. The other 99 percent have long since perished.1 By far the worst of the mass extinctions occurred an estimated 245 million years ago and took several million years to run its course. But though it was gradual, it was also exceptionally deadly. Scientists believe fully 95 percent of all the forms of plant and animal life in the seas at that time were likely eliminated. Though the cause is still hotly debated, many scientists believe that the consolidation of all of the continents then in existence into a single landmass—called Pangaea—caused sea levels to fall, the land to heat, and the ocean to stagnate. In this scenario, carbon dioxide levels rose, the heat increased, oxygen levels in the ocean plummeted. Slowly but surely, life in nearly all its forms suffocated to death.2 All we know about the creatures that vanished is what they left behind, their fossilized remains—petrified plantlike stems and calices of sea-dwelling crinoids, limy corals, bits of ammonite shell, skeletons of certain kinds of fish, tiny seagoing creatures.

  But extinctions can also occur with cataclysmic suddenness. The age of the dinosaurs, those massive reptiles that ruled the Earth for more than 165 million years, appears to have ended abruptly, in geological terms, roughly 65 million years ago. To this day, no one knows why. One theory, intriguing though not widely accepted, points to the fact that this was a period of intense volcanic activity in many places on the Earth’s crust. Perhaps the most spectacular eruption occurred in what is now southern India. There, between 66 and 68 million years ago, the Earth cleaved apart, spewing what may have been as much as 48,000 cubic miles of lava over an area of more than 772,000 square miles,3 an area roughly three quarters the size of the entire American West. The remnant of this event is a formation known to geologists as the Deccan Traps.4 The consequences of an eruption of this scale could have been appalling: Immense quantities of dust and ash would have been flung into the upper atmosphere and, in a matter of weeks, would have darkened the sky everywhere on the globe. In time, starved of light, plants would have shriveled and died. Animals that lived on plants would have followed, and animals that lived on other animals would, in turn, have followed them. What may have happened next is uncertain. The sulfurous air could have reduced temperatures sharply worldwide. Alternatively, the death of plants on land, and algae in the seas, may have caused carbon dioxide levels in the air to skyrocket, creating a massive greenhouse effect.5 In no time at all, geologically speaking—perhaps only a few thousand years—the diversity of life on Earth would have been drastically reduced.

  That is one theory. Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed another, more frightening one: that the great age of dinosaurs was terminated by the impact of an object plummeting from space. Examining rocks in Gubbio, Italy, the scientists found surprisingly high levels of a rare element called iridium in a narrow band of rock that dated back 65 million years. Iridium does not occur normally in the Earth’s crust in such concentrations: Most arrives from space through the gentle rain of cosmic dust and the somewhat less gentle arrival of small meteorites and asteroids. The accumulation of this element has been fairly consistent throughout time. But in this particular layer, the element appeared in the rock at a concentration equal to all the iridium that had been deposited in the preceding half million years!6 In 1980 researchers felt confident enough to make an announcement that was quite literally earth-shattering: 65 million years ago, they explained, an asteroid or comet roughly the size of Mount Everest struck the Earth at a speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour, creating an explosion 10,000 times more powerful than if all the nuclear bombs that exist today had gone off at once. The impact vaporized the comet or asteroid and spread iridium—and destruction—across a great swath of the Earth’s surface, in roughly the same manner and to the same effect as the Deccan Trap eruptions.7 The impact theory was strongly supported a decade later by the discovery of a crater, one of the largest yet discovered. Between 100 and 125 miles in diameter, it was found beneath the Yucatán Peninsula and the Caribbean Sea. Its date of origin? Roughly 65 million years ago. Other craters of similar age also have been discovered.8

  So, which phenomenon caused the disappearance of virtually every single dinosaur on Earth? Maybe both, and other events as well.9 It may well be that the age of dinosaurs was, in both ecological and evolutionary terms, an immense house of cards—intact but extraordinarily fragile. Or it may be more like the straw that broke the camel’s back; as one scientist puts it, “Things got bad, then they got worse.”10

  Although similar in effect, the second extinction of the dinosaurs of the Bahariya Oasis, which occurred less than a century ago, had a different cause altogether. This particular extinction was a product of neither terrestrial nor extraterrestrial geologic forces. This extinction was man-made.

  Wing Commander G. Leonard Cheshire arrived at the Royal Air Force’s aerodrome at Woodhall Spa on the morning of April 24, 1944, as the soft spring sunlight began burnishing the hazy, expansive landscape of eastern England. An American expatriate to England, the poet T. S. Eliot, once wrote that “April is the cruellest month,” but in Lincolnshire it can be positively radiant, the grass impossibly green, fields of nearly black soil freshly plowed and planted, lanes replete with naturalized daffodils and hedgerows frothy with hawthorn blossoms. As flat as a snooker table and richly fertile, this area just south of the Lincolnshire Wolds, along with the adjoining reaches of Cambridgeshire, contains to this day some of Britain’s finest farmland, producing a wide array of market vegetables and flowers for the country’s industrial cities. But after the outbreak of World War II, the region’s principal crop was aerodromes. Close to the coast, and therefore to Nazi Germany, the farm fields became airfields. RAF Woodhall Spa, with three runways forming a rough triangle, a pair of corrugated-iron hangars, and a scattering of thrown-together brick huts, was simply one of dozens of airfields scattered across the eastern counties. The pilots and officers were billeted in a hotel in town that had been requisitioned by the Air Ministry. They got to and from the airfield mostly by bicycle.

  As he approached the flight briefing room, Leonard Cheshire was effectively a walking miracle. An RAF bomber pilot for nearly four years, Cheshire by now should have been dead. The RAF’s losses through the first three years of the war had been staggering. On average, of every hundred crew members in Bomber Command, only twenty-seven survived. Losses for each sortie or bombing mission ranged from 5 to as high as 10 percent. A single tour of duty for a bomber pilot involved thirty sorties. Mathematically, at least, a pilot couldn’t be expected to live through one complete tour of duty. Cheshire was well into his fourth. He was twenty-seven years old.

  Cheshire was an unlike
ly ace. With his movie-star looks and a college career at Oxford that he freely admitted was distinguished more by carousing than achievement, he hardly seemed a candidate for greatness. One biography describes his college years as “a time of fast cars, reckless exploits, fantastic extravagance, mounting debts and shady associations.”11 A student of the law, he graduated with a second-class degree, but that would turn out to be of far less importance to Cheshire, and to England, than another skill he learned at school: the science and art of flying. Cheshire joined the university’s Air Squadron in 1936, and the undeniable panache attached to flying suited him perfectly. He was commissioned in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1937, as war with Germany began to seem inevitable; he joined No. 102 Squadron in June 1940, immediately after completing his degree. And there Cheshire seemed to find himself at last, quickly demonstrating remarkable flying skills and strong but compassionate leadership ability. Combining what his fellow pilots described as an ice-cold brain and hair-raising flight tactics, Cheshire soon won the admiration of his crews and the respect of the leadership of Bomber Command. During the next four years he and his crews were assigned ever more difficult missions. Unlike most of his fellow pilots and squadron leaders, however, Cheshire always made it home—though sometimes only barely.

  On this particular morning, April 24, 1944, Cheshire knew that this, his hundredth mission, had an importance that far exceeded any other in his flying career to date. Cheshire had become the critical weapon in a high-risk battle between not England and Germany but two senior officers of RAF Bomber Command. That the outcome of this night’s sortie might substantially affect the success of the upcoming top-secret Allied invasion of France seemed, at that moment at least, secondary to the war that had been waged for months between No. 8 Bomb Group commander Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett and No. 5 Bomb Group commander Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane.