Stromer was a study in irony. Though often considered frail, he survived the punishing heat (and cold) of Egypt’s Western Desert, and eventually lived to the age of 82. He disliked roughing it, but preferred that to crowded, noisy cities, so he braved windstorms in flea-infested tents near tiny towns or in the middle of nowhere. He was landed gentry but always short of cash. He resented an Egyptian assistant, whom he depended on completely, for trying to rise above his “station.” Years later, however, Stromer irritated the Third Reich for refusing to join the Nazi party and—worse—for maintaining ties with Jewish colleagues.
—MICHON SCOTT, HTTPS://WWW.STRANGESCIENCE.NET/STROMER.HTM
STROMER’S RIDDLE
Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach experienced both the highest highs and the lowest of lows in his 82 years of life (figure 13.1). He was born into an aristocratic family (the “Freiherr” in his name is roughly equivalent to “Baron”), but his boss, a prominent Nazi, treated him with disdain and tragically refused to allow Stromer’s fossils to be removed to safe storage during World War II—which meant they were destroyed by Allied bombing. Meanwhile, the Third Reich sent his three sons off to die in World War II. (One of them ended up in a Soviet POW camp, survived, and eventually got home to Germany in 1950.) Stromer made incredible discoveries in Egypt, then had to wait over a decade to see most of his fossils. He finally got to describe his fossils, only to see them vanish in a single night. He lived seven more years after the war ended, but he never had another chance to make important scientific discoveries.
Figure 13.1
Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach standing next to one of the Egyptian dinosaur bones. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Stromer’s greatest claim to fame was his role in leading one of the first great paleontological expeditions to Egypt. From the 1880s through 1914, Germany was the world leader in science and scholarship, and its archeologists were making amazing discoveries, from unearthing ruins in Mesopotamia to the discovery of ancient Troy and ancient Mycenae. The Berlin Museum and Werner Janensch spent years in German East Africa (now Tanzania) finding the famous Tendaguru dinosaur fauna (see chapter 9), and Friedrich von Huene made important discoveries about Plateosaurus (see chapter 6).
Stromer came from the same scholarly tradition and was bitten by the bug of exploration. As early as 1901, when he was only 30 years old, he was already a curator at the natural history museum in Munich, the Paläontologisches Museum München, and had visited Egypt for the first time. He became convinced that important fossils could be found there, and he was particularly interested in finding fossil mammals. Stromer spent several years raising funds and making contacts so that he could undertake a grand expedition to Egypt, primarily to collect mammal fossils as the British had already found some incredible mammals in the Fayûm area just west of Cairo.
Stromer finally arrived in Egypt in November 1910, but his luck failed and he was stuck in port in Alexandria for days while his ship was quarantined for cholera. When he finally arrived in Cairo, he contacted the local German Egyptologist and John Ball, head of the Geological Survey of Egypt, to get the necessary permits and maps. As early as 1910, tensions were rising between Britain and Germany, and it was not easy for Germans to get permits from the British authorities, who ruled Egypt. Many were suspicious of German scientists wandering about in remote areas away from supervision, possibly spying for the Kaiser. After some delays, Stromer finally met his friend and the local fossil collector, Richard Markgraf, who had helped him during his first visit in 1901.
On November 19, 1910, they began to travel across the Gizeh Plateau past the Great Pyramids. Traveling west, they visited Wadi el Natrun, where they found lots of scrappy fossils of turtles and crocodiles but no spectacular mammals. After a month in the field, Stromer returned to Cairo, but Markgraf remained behind. When Markgraf turned up in Cairo a few weeks later, he brought with him an important find: the skull of a small relative of the Colobus monkey that Stromer later named and described as Libypithecus markgrafi. The collectors then traveled up the Nile, but they found nothing on this leg of the expedition.
For the final part of the expedition in early January 1911, they took a train all the way to the western edge of Egypt near the Libyan border to the Bahariya Oasis. Stromer expected to find Eocene mammals there similar to those the British had found in the Fayûm, but he was off by tens of millions of years. The beds he found there were Lower Cretaceous and were virtually unknown and unexplored by scientists. The explorers were delayed by howling winds, freezing nights, and even major sandstorms, but when the weather finally cleared, they began to explore in earnest. After finding lots of shark and other fish teeth and petrified wood, Stromer finally got his first lucky break. Wandering around the flank of a hill called Jebel El Diest, he found “three large bones which I attempt to excavate and photograph. The upper extremity is heavily weathered and incomplete [but] measures 110 cm long and 15 cm thick. The second and better one underneath is probably a femur [thighbone] and is wholly 95 cm long and, in the middle, also 15 cm thick. The third is too deep in the ground and will require too much time to recover.” Then he found part of a dinosaur hip and a huge claw. Stromer had not brought burlap bags and plaster of Paris that most fossil collectors used, so he was forced to cut up mosquito netting and soak it in a mixture of flour and water to form a jacket around the fragile fossils. After exploring some other areas and collecting more fossils, he was on his way home to Germany by February 18, 1911. Over the next few years, Stromer led several more trips to Bahariya Oasis and recovered many more fossils, returning from his last trip in 1914, shortly before World War I broke out.
Unfortunately, Stromer had bad luck again: most of his fossils were still in Egypt when the war started, and he was stuck in his museum without many of his fossils through the four years of war. Even after the war ended in 1918, Stromer had to wait until 1922 before the fossils all finally arrived from Egypt. When he opened the crates, he found that the fossils had been unpacked by the Egyptian authorities and repacked poorly, so they were in fragments. He spent months piecing them all together before finally publishing on them during the 1920s and 1930s.
At the high point of his career, when his bizarre and spectacular finds were finally published, Stromer’s luck once again ran out as the Nazis took over. Even though his age and aristocratic background protected him against personal recriminations, all three of his sons were drafted and fought in the war, where two were killed. As the Allied bombing continued to strike deeper into the heart of Germany, museum curators packed their most important objects of art and natural history and hid them in deep caves and salt mines. But the head of the Paläontologisches Museum München, Karl Beurlen, was an ardent Nazi and ignored Stromer’s begging and pleading to move the fossils before Munich was bombed. The final blow came on the night of April 24–25, 1944, when the British Royal Air Force bombed Munich; the museum and all its collections were totally destroyed. All of Stromer’s dangerous and hard work in Egypt, and years of scientific research and publication, was gone in a single night. Many other important dinosaur fossils in German museums were destroyed in the same way during other nights of bombing, including many of the Plateosaurus fossils (see chapter 6) and a lot of the Tendaguru bones in Berlin (see chapter 9). After the war ended, paleontologists have routinely made multiple casts of important fossils and shared them with other museums just in case a disaster, such as a war or a flood, destroyed the museum. (In September 2018, the Brazilian Museum burned to the ground, destroying lots of irreplaceable objects, but some of the fossils have replicas in other museums).
Stromer spent the last eight years of his life a broken man, with only the return of his son Wolfgang from a Soviet POW camp in 1950 as a solace in his old age. But during his career he had described a wide range of important fossils from the Egyptian Cretaceous, including the sauropod Aegyptosaurus, the giant crocodile Stomatosuchus, and a number of theropods including Bahariasaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, and Spinosaurus. What struck Stromer as odd was the high diversity of predators, with three large theropods and a huge crocodile but hardly any herbivorous animals except the sauropod. Normally one would expect the prey species to greatly outnumber the predators; in most large animal communities, the biomass of prey species has to be about 10 times the biomass of predators. Later paleontologists called this dilemma regarding the imbalance of Egypt’s dinosaur fauna “Stromer’s Riddle.” The answer would not be forthcoming until the twenty-first century and renewed activity in North Africa.
PIECING TOGETHER THE LOST DINOSAUR
Thanks to the bombing of Munich, all that remained of the original Stromer Spinosaurus collection was photographs, illustrations, descriptions, and measurements. In fact, the original dinosaur was very poorly known, with just the tall spines of the backbone vertebrae, part of a lower jaw and a few neck vertebrae, a few ribs, and isolated scraps of other bones (figure 13.2). Stromer also described part of an upper jaw, but it was never illustrated because it was poorly preserved. The size and shape of the dinosaur was highly conjectural because almost no parts of the skull, limbs or limb girdles, and tail survived to provide important clues of its real shape and size. So how do we know anything about the dinosaur at all?
Figure 13.2
Original illustration of the handful of partial fossils of Spinosaurus, from Stromer’s monographs. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
One solution would be to go back to Bahariya Oasis and try to find more fossils of Spinosaurus. In 2001, an expedition led by Joshua Smith and Ken Lacovara of the University of Pennsylvania did just that, and they found quite a few fossils (figure 13.3). Some of them belonged to a huge titanosaur sauropod they named Paralititan, which was about 80 feet long and weighed about 63 metric tonnes (70 tons). They also analyzed the sedimentary environment of the Bahariya Formation and found it represented a nearshore setting of lagoons and rivers and swamps close to the ocean. With this discovery (and the discovery of other herbivorous dinosaurs from elsewhere in North Africa, such as the sail-backed iguanodont Ouranosaurus), Stromer’s Riddle has been answered. There were plenty of large sauropods, iguanodonts, and other prey species for the large predators to eat. Unfortunately, the 2001 University of Pennsylvania expedition found very little material that would help in our quest to see the entire Spinosaurus.
Figure 13.3
View of Bahariya Oasis locality where Paraliatitan was found by the University of Pennsylvania expeditions, and near Stromer’s locality for Spinosaurus. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Modern technology has been used to reconstruct Stromer’s lost fossils, carefully digitizing the existing photographs and illustrations and turning them into solid objects again with a 3D printer. This technique does not replace all the information the original fossils yielded, but at least it gives us the size and shape of a replica of the bones.
Fortunately, other Spinosaurus fossils have turned up elsewhere in North Africa. In 1996, the Kem Kem beds of southern Morocco yielded vertebrae of an even bigger spinosaur that Dale Russell named Spinosaurus maroccanus, although today paleontologists doubt that it is anything more than a larger individual of Spinosaurus aegypticus, or possibly the spinosaurid Sigilmassasaurus. Another Moroccan specimen ended up in the Museé National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and consists of most of the upper jaw and fragments of the lower jaw. Yet another specimen from the Kem Kem beds is now in the Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano (Milan Natural History Museum) and consists of a complete snout originally misidentified as a crocodile. In 2008, an anonymous local fossil collector gave a box of bones to paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim while he was visiting Morocco. This turned out to be parts of a subadult skeleton, with fragments of the skull, many neck and back vertebrae, including the tall spines, some of the shoulder and arm bones, parts of the hip, complete hind limbs, and many tail vertebrae. In 2014, Ibrahim, Paul Sereno, and coauthors published a composite reconstruction of Spinosaurus that made use of all the pieces now known and tried to give us a look at the complete animal.
SPINOSAURUS RESURRECTED
What kind of dinosaur was Spinosaurus? It wasn’t much like the outdated version seen in the third Jurassic Park movie, which was a huge biped that terrified even a tyrannosaur. If the reconstruction by Ibrahim, Sereno, and colleagues is valid, it was a quadrupedal swimmer that acted more like a crocodile and spent little or no time walking on its hind legs on land (figure 13.4). Its long, narrow snout was filled with conical teeth for catching fish, not blade-like teeth with serrated edges suitable for ripping flesh, as found in most theropods. And it was nowhere near as big as Jurassic Park III had rendered it. At best, it was more slender and only slightly longer than a Tyrannosaurus, but it was without the huge body mass or the flesh-ripping teeth or powerful neck and jaws for biting large prey. If it encountered a large theropod, it would almost certainly have backed off or fled for the nearest water.
Figure 13.4
(A) Modern reconstructed skeleton of Spinosaurus showing it was mostly a quadrupedal swimming animal with subequal front and hind limbs, not a gigantic bipedal predator as in the Jurassic Park III movie; (B) modern artistic reconstruction of Spinosaurus. ([A] Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; [B] courtesy of N. Tamura)
Almost all of the features of Spinosaurus are adaptations for an aquatic lifestyle as well. Midway back on the snout were its nostrils, suitable for breathing while partially submerged. The snout also had channels for nerves that would have helped it sense changes in water pressure caused by the motion of prey in the water. Its stumpy limbs were not suitable for walking on land, but they were good for paddling in the water, and the long thin finger and toe bones suggest that it had webbed feet. Even the geochemistry of the bones and teeth suggest it was an aquatic animal. Finally, the limb bones were very dense and solid, typical of animals such as hippos that need dense limb bones to help as ballast.
The biggest mystery was the enormous sail on the back of Spinosaurus, which gave it the name. It was clearly not big enough to be a true “sail” for propelling it through the water under wind power; it was much too small for the huge bulk of the dinosaur. In fact, it’s so large and conspicuous that it would prevent the dinosaur from completely submerging underwater and sneaking up on prey, as crocodilians do. Others have argued that it was a big heat-gathering surface for regulating body temperature, but then why does it not occur in any other theropod (but for some reason, does occur in the African iguanodontid Ouranosaurus)? Most paleontologists point to the large conspicuous nature of the sail and consider it some sort of device to advertise its huge size and dominance in competing with other spinosaurs in its territory, as the horns and antlers of many deer and antelopes do today.
So how big was Spinosaurus? Estimating length on many dinosaurs is problematic when we have only a few bones, and weight estimates are even more speculative. Remember, even the fairly complete 2014 reconstruction by Ibrahim, Sereno, and others did not include much of the tail among the bones recovered, so the length cannot be measured directly but only estimated based on the proportions of other bones.
In 1926, Friedrich von Huene (who was able to see the original fossils before they were destroyed) put its length at 15 meters (almost 50 feet) and weight at 6 metric tonnes (6.6 tons). But this was based on the fragments that Stromer had at that time, which was mostly the sail and lower jaw and not much else. Dinosaur artist Greg Paul in 1988 pegged its length at 15 meters (49 feet) and a mass of 4 metric tonnes (4.4 tons), but again this was when almost nothing was known of the dinosaur other than Stromer’s original fragmentary fossils. In 2005, Del Sasso and colleagues estimated its length at 16–18 meters (52–59 feet) and weight at 7–9 metric tonnes (7.7–9.9 tons) using comparisons with other spinosaurs such as Suchomimus, but this has been criticized because it is based on the incomplete skull of Spinosaurus. Based on comparisons with a wide range of theropods, Francois Therrien and Donald Henderson’s 2007 estimate considered the previous numbers to be too large. They put the body length at 12.6–14.3 meters (41–47 feet) and the weight at 12–21 metric tonnes (13.2–23.0 tons). The lower end of this estimated range would make Spinosaurus smaller than not only Tyrannosaurus rex but also Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus. Finally, the 2014 estimate of Ibrahim, Sereno, and others based on their composite skeleton from many individuals (including some juvenile bones) places its length at 15.2 meters (51 feet). If Tyrannosaurus rex was about 13 meters (43 feet) and about 10 metric tonnes (11 tons), it was only slightly smaller than Spinosaurus. Clearly, the scene in Jurassic Park III in which Spinosaurus picks up a T. rex and tosses it around like a toy is pure fiction, based on what we now know of Spinosaurus. It was much more likely to be the other way around: a bulldog predator with the crushing bite of a T. rex would easily kill a lightly built fish-eater like Spinosaurus in a fight, even if the latter was slightly longer.
THE SPINOSAURS
Spinosaurus is the most famous of the fish-eating group broadly known as spinosaurs, but they are much more diverse than just the famous namesake of the group. Another of the famous spinosaurs is Baryonyx walkeri, one of the stars of the recent movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Its genus name means “heavy claw” in Greek, and its species name honors amateur fossil hunter William Walker, who found an enormous claw in a clay pit near Ockley, in Surrey, England, in early January 1983. These clays were part of the same Lower Cretaceous Wealden beds that yielded Iguanodon to Gideon Mantell more than 150 years earlier (see chapter 2). In all the years since then, many people had searched the Wealden for more dinosaurs, so it is remarkable that finally another one turned up after so much time.
British Museum (Natural History) paleontologists Alan Charig and Angela Milner visited his locality a few weeks later in February 1983 and found more bones. By June the museum crew had collected most of the skeleton, with over 2 tonnes of matrix and bones altogether. The owners of the pit, Ockley Brick Company, not only donated the skeleton to the Natural History Museum but even provided heavy equipment to help the crew with the excavation.
Even though the bones were no longer articulated, they were close to their life position, so the skeleton could be reconstructed accurately (figure 13.5). What they discovered was a dinosaur that looked nothing like anything that had been seen at that time. (Remember, Spinosaurus was then known from only the few pieces destroyed in the bombing raid, so there were few overlapping parts.) The long-snouted face with fish-catching teeth made some think it was a crocodile, but the rest of the bones clearly showed Charig and Milner that it was a dinosaur trying to live like a crocodile. The limbs were about equal in length, so it was capable of quadrupedal locomotion, as well as bipedality, like Spinosaurus. Not only did it have a snout like a crocodile with conical fish-catching teeth, but fish fossils were found among its stomach contents. Its robust front limbs apparently carried the huge claws that Walker had first found, which were suitable for grappling with prey. Charig and Milner were not certain what kind of dinosaur it resembled because it was bizarre and not very complete. However, French paleontologist Eric Buffetaut and dinosaur artist Greg Paul noticed the characteristic shape of the upturned tip of the lower jaw and the distinctive tooth sockets and suggested it might be like the (then poorly known) Spinosaurus. Since then, additional fossils have confirmed this. Baryonyx has since been reported from Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe. In contrast to the problem of fragmentary dinosaurs found previously in Britain (see chapters 1–3), Baryonyx is the most complete dinosaur ever found in the United Kingdom.
Figure 13.5
Baryonyx walkeri: (A) skeletal reconstruction in the Southwestern Florida Museum of Natural History; (B) life-like reconstruction of the animal as a delicately built fish-eater. ([A] Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; [B] courtesy of N. Tamura)
Spinosaurs are found in Europe and North Africa as well as elsewhere in the Early Cretaceous. Suchomimus (mentioned earlier) was a much larger spinosaur found in the Elrhaz Formation in the Sahara Desert of Niger by my friend Paul Sereno and crew and described in 1998. At about 9.5 meters (31 feet) and 2.5 tonnes (2.75 tons), it was only slightly smaller than Spinosaurus. It also had the characteristic crocodile-like snout and skull, and long spines on its back, not over the shoulders and middle back as in Spinosaurus but over the hips. In addition, there is Cristatusaurus, also from Niger, and Sigilmassasaurus from the Kem Kem beds. Ostafrikasaurus, found in the Tendaguru beds of Tanzania by the Germans in 1912, was recognized as another spinosaurid by Eric Buffetaut in 2012. So spinosaurids were widespread over Europe and Africa.
Spinosaurs even occurred in Asia and South America. Ichthyovenator comes from Laos and Siamosaurus from Thailand. Irritator and Oxalaia are known from the Cretaceous of Brazil, extending the range of these animals across more of Pangea. Irritator, named by David Martill and colleagues in 1996, consists of a partial skull that has a very crocodile-like shape. However, Hans-Dieter Sues and colleagues first realized in 2002 that it was a spinosaur, and it is the most complete skull of a spinosaur found to date. The name Irritator comes from the fact that the fossil was found in an old museum collection (with no locality information), apparently bought from dealers who had tried to improve its sales potential. They had added a piece of jaw to “enhance” the specimen, first thought to be a huge pterodactyl, and make the fossil look more marketable. Once the specimen was under study by scientists, it was an irritating task to get rid of the fakery and clean it down to the original bone. Its full scientific name is Irritator challengeri, after Professor Challenger of the novel The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, also author of Sherlock Holmes.
Although their fossils are not common, the crocodile-like spinosaurs were ubiquitous in the Early Cretaceous on most of the major continents—Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and South America. Only North America has no record of the group yet, although some North American theropod teeth have been suggested to be spinosaurid.
FOR FURTHER READING
Colbert, Edwin. Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in the Field and in the Laboratory. New York: Dutton, 1968.
Farlow, James, Mike Brett-Surman, and Robert Walters. The Complete Dinosaur. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Fastovsky, David, and David Weishampel. Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Holtz, Thomas R., Jr. Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages. New York: Random House, 2011.
Holtz, Thomas R., Jr., Ralph E. Molnar, and Philip J. Currie. “Basal Tetanurae.” In The Dinosauria, 2nd ed., ed. David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska, 71–110. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Ibrahim, Nizar, Paul C. Sereno, Christiano Dal Sasso, Simone Maganuco, Matteo Fabbri, David M. Martill, Samir Zouhri, Nathan Myhrvold, and Dawid A. Iurino. “Semiaquatic Adaptations in a Giant Predatory Dinosaur.” Science 345, no. 6204 (2014): 1613–1616.
Naish, Darren. The Great Dinosaur Discoveries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Naish, Darren, and Paul M. Barrett. Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2016.
Nothdurft, William, and Josh Smith. The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. New York: Random House, 2002.
Sereno, Paul C., Allison L. Beck, Didier B. Dutheuil, Boubacar Gado, Hans C. E. Larsson, Gabrielle H. Lyon, Jonathan D. Marcot, Oliver W. M. Rauhut, Rudyard W. Sadleir, Christian A. Sidor, David D. Varricchio, Gregory P. Wilson, and Jeffrey A. Wilson. “A Long-Snouted Predatory Dinosaur from Africa and the Evolution of Spinosaurids.” Science 282, no. 5392 (1998): 1298–1302.
Sereno, Paul C., Didier B. Dutheil, M. Iarochene, Hans C. E. Larsson, Gabrielle H. Lyon, Paul M. Magwene, Christian A. Sidor, David J. Varricchio, and Jeffrey A. Wilson. “Predatory Dinosaurs from the Sahara and Late Cretaceous Faunal Differentiation.” Science 272, no. 5264 (1996): 986–991.
Smith, Joshua B., Matthew C. Lamanna, Kenneth J. Lacovara, Peter Dodson, Jennifer R. Smith, Jason C. Poole, Robert Giegengack, and Yousry Attia. “A Giant Sauropod Dinosaur from an Upper Cretaceous Mangrove Deposit in Egypt.” Science 292, no. 5522 (2001): 1704–1706.
Weishampel, David B., Paul M. Barrett, Rodolfo A. Coria, Jean Le Loeuff, Xu Xing, Zhao Xijin, Ashok Sahni, Elizabeth M. P. Gomani, and Christopher R. Noto. “Dinosaur Distribution.” In The Dinosauria, 2nd ed., ed. David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson, and Halszka Osmólska, 517–606. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Wilford, John Noble. The Riddle of the Dinosaur. New York: Knopf, 1985.