Photo Source: National Geographic
Whether you’re a fan of dinosaurs in general or love them in films like the Jurassic Park series, this week’s episode of the Overheard at National Geographic podcast is an exciting one. The October issue of National Geographic magazine was all about recent dinosaur discoveries and this episode, titled “The Strange Tail of Spinosaurus,” finally laid to rest theories about one of the biggest, most fearsome dinosaurs that ever walked (and swam).
Not included in the podcast is some Jurassic Park tie-in information. For those that don’t remember, Spineosaurus was the most fearsome dinosaur in Jurassic Park III where it not only took down a T-Rex, but also made its final attack in a river. Made in 2001, the filmmakers were going off of scientific theories that were being debated that the creature could swim. Based on having conical teeth great for grabbing slippery prey and dense thigh bones like water mammals for buoyancy control, claims were made that it could swim despite lack of any known propeller feature. Having feet like a T-Rex wouldn’t have made it a good swimmer alone and some thought an answer to the mystery might never be found.
In the episode, host Peter Gwin gives some more background about the history of Spinosaurus. It was discovered in Africa in the 1910’s by Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach, a Bavarian aristocrat and paleontologist. Only a handful of bones were found, which included some ribs, a lower jaw, and seven giant spines. Most of the bones on the dig site were reduced to rubble and the ones that were pulled out intact were displayed in a museum in Munich, which was destroyed during World War II bombings. When Jurassic Park III was made, the ferocious beast was based almost entirely on this one find.
Two guests appear in this episode, one of which is National Geographic explorer Nizar Ibrahim. During a college research trip to the Sahara Desert in 2008, Nizar saw firsthand the black market for fossil selling, where tens of thousands of people illegally dig to sell fossils to private collectors. Out of a cardboard box from a mustachioed man, he purchased a unique bone that he had never seen before, a particularly spiky piece with a red tip. Hoping more could be discovered about it, he donated the fossil to the University of Casablanca and returned to the University of Chicago to continue his education.
After college, Nizar was in Italy meeting with some paleontologist colleagues who showed him a partial skeleton in a museum’s backroom that was donated. It reportedly came from north Africa, although a more specific area was not known, and it had tall spines. Nizar noticed that some of the bones looked exactly like the strange one he purchased in college
Going off his memory of the man who sold it to him, National Geographic provided Nizar with a grant to travel to Morocco to try and find the fossil seller, a needle in a haystack expedition. As luck would have it, he randomly found him in a cafe and upon asking him about the bone he bought, the seller shared that all of the other bones he found in that area were bought by an Italian man. Nizar realized that this meant that the bone he once purchased was likely from the same incomplete fossil he saw in Italy and the seller took him to the site where he found them, a remote and elevated location in the desert.
Not only was this episode of Overheard at National Geographic cool for dinosaur fans, but it also had an emotional element to it. Nizar Ibrahim’s father was German and his mother was Moroccan. The scientific study of Spinosaurus all started with German Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach’s discovery in Morocco, making it feel almost like fate for him to be part of the discovery of the most complete Spinosaurus fossil ever discovered. A new sculpted Spinosaurus is being prepared and will make his debut in Berlin to bring the story full circle.
You can listen to this full episode and others at the official Overheard at National Geographic website.