The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt: The Astonishing and Unlikely True Story of One of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Paleontological Discoveries - Softcover

Nothdurft, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375759794 ISBN 13: 9780375759796

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003

Synopsis

In 1911, Dr. Ernst Stromer led an expedition to Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis in the Sahara and discovered four new species of dinosaurs, including the Tyrannosaurus rex–size predator Spinosaurus. But tragically, all his work was incinerated in 1944 during the Allied bombing of Munich.

In 1999, Josh Smith, then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, took his brilliant, precocious team to Egypt under the direction of world-renowned paleontologist Dr. Peter Dodson and blundered onto an archaeological site that yielded awe-inspiring results: all of Dr. Stromer’s early findings, and also an entirely new genus of dinosaur, Paralititan stromeri, one of the largest creatures ever to inhabit the planet.

About this title

About the Author

William Nothdurft is the author, coauthor, or ghostwriter of nearly a dozen books, including the award-winning Ghosts of Everest, about the search for the missing mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Josh Smith served six years in the U.S. Army before getting his B.Sc. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an assistant professor at Washington University.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

“The sometimes perilous search for rare dinosaur bones can make for great adventures, as evidenced in The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt.” —Discover

“If you loved Indiana Jones, you’ll adore this tale of two dinosaur hunters whose expeditions to Egypt, separated by nearly a century of warfare and mystery, brought to light what may have been the largest creature that ever walked the earth.” —Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

“Told deftly and dramatically . . . The tale will keep you riveted as the Smith team unearths Stromer’s lost dinosaurs and the ‘giant near the sea’ rises again.” —The Providence Journal

“Fascinating material.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating . . . Nothdurft is a science writer who weaves a brilliant and colorful tale.” —Newsday

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
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 unlikely 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...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375759794
• ISBN 13: 9780375759796
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272