PALAEONTOLOGY
Dr Nizar Ibrahim excavating fossils in the Sahara .
It was in the Kem Kem in the 2000s and 2010s that Dr Ibrahim and his team discovered the prehistoric remains of creatures ranging from flying reptiles to crocodile-like hunters as long as buses and fish the size of SUVs . Most famously , after tracking down a local bone finder (“ it was like looking for a needle in a haystack ”), he unearthed the skeleton of a Spinosaurus aegyptiacus , a predator with retracted nostrils , paddle-like feet and relatively short hind legs . A hundred million years ago , the Kem Kem was part of a huge river system stretching from Morocco to Egypt . Was the
PHOTO : NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ITALY / NANNI FONTANA
Spinosaurus , bigger than the biggest T . rex ( Tyrannosaurus rex ), finally proof that at least one dinosaur could swim ?
In 2018 , they discovered much of its tail – a humongous , highly flexible fin .
“ That tail was a game changer ,” says Dr Ibrahim , sitting in his office at the University of Portsmouth , where he lectures in palaeontology ; his other roles include National Geographic Explorer and TED fellow ( to palaeontology what Brian Cox is to physics , Dr Ibrahim ’ s erudite and engaging TED videos have racked up well over 1,000,000 views ).
“ Multiple lines of evidence pointed to this being a fish-eating river monster dinosaur that probably spent most of its life in the water .”
Dr Ibrahim ’ s discovery spawned TV documentaries , high-profile speaking gigs and features in publications including Nature , The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine . And debate : of all the ‘ ologies ’, palaeontology is especially competitive . Dr Ibrahim , steely as well as charming , is unperturbed : “ We are challenging decade-old dogmas ,” he says of claims that Spinosaurus was a wader , a kind of giant spoonbill . “ Pushback is to be expected .”
He ’ d rather focus on the restoration of the legacy of his major inspiration , German palaeontologist ( and anti-Nazi ) Ernst Stromer , who , in 1911 , found the first dinosaur bones in Egypt , and in 1915 described the first fossils of an animal he called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus . Those bones were destroyed in a British air raid over Munich in World War II , and Stromer ’ s name faded into obscurity .
Dr Ibrahim was a dinosaur-mad child in West Berlin in the 1980s and 1990s when he happened upon a mention of Stromer and his find , whose likeness only existed in notes and drawings . Fascinated by the idea of lost worlds filled with fabulous creatures , savvy to the notion that the present is
That tail was a game changer . Multiple lines of evidence pointed to this being a fisheating river monster dinosaur that probably spent most of its life in the water .
– Dr Nizar Ibrahim
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