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Palaeontology: New North African predatory dinosaur species discovered in 80-year-old photos
In 1914, German palaeontologists discovered the fossils of a dinosaur in Egypt. More than a century later, a student came across photos of the bones destroyed during the Second World War and could hardly believe what he saw. Scientists from LMU and SNSB recognised a previously unknown, approximately 95 million-year-old predatory dinosaur species from the North African Cretaceous period in the 80-year-old images.
War destruction
The fossil’s eventful history goes back a long way: the original skeleton of the large predatory dinosaur was discovered by the Munich palaeontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach (1871-1952). In 1914, he carried out an excavation expedition in the Egyptian oasis of Bahariya, during which the impressive skeleton came to light. The fossil, together with other finds, was then taken to the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology in Munich. There, Stromer examined the specimen and assigned it to the genus Carcharodontosaurus, a group of ‘shark-toothed lizards’ which, at around ten metres in length, were among the largest land-dwelling carnivores in the history of the earth.
However, this assessment did not hold up. During an air raid on Munich in July 1944, the Alte Akademie, where the collection was housed, was hit by a bomb. The building was burnt to the ground and most of the valuable fossils, including the dinosaur finds from Egypt, were destroyed. Only Stromer’s notes and some photos and drawings of the bones survived. For decades, however, hardly anyone paid any attention to these documents.
It was not until 80 years later that palaeontologist Maximilian Kellermann, a student at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), took another look at the documents. He discovered previously unknown photos of the fossils, which showed parts of the skull, spine and hind legs. It quickly became clear that these finds differed significantly from other known specimens of the genus Carcharodontosaurus.
‘The historical images surprised us all,’ explains Maximilian Kellermann, first author of the study. ‘The depicted skeleton showed clear differences to the previously known Moroccan Carcharodontosaurus finds. Stromer’s original categorisation was incorrect. We have identified a previously unknown predatory dinosaur species and named it Tameryraptor markgrafi.’
Tameryraptor was about ten metres long and was characterised by symmetrical teeth and a conspicuous nasal horn. The name refers to ‘Tamery’, the ancient Egyptian term for Egypt as the ‘Promised Land’. It also honours Richard Markgraf, Stromer’s fossil collector, who once excavated the finds. The researchers discovered that Tameryraptor was closely related to other North African and South American carcharodontosaurs as well as to a group of predatory dinosaurs from Asia, the metriacanthosaurs.
‘The dinosaur fauna of North Africa was probably much more diverse than previously assumed,’ says Oliver Rauhut. ‘This discovery shows that the search for fossils can be worthwhile not only in the earth, but also in old archives. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of the Cretaceous predatory dinosaur fauna of the Bahariya Oasis, it would be important to recover more fossils from this region.’
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