ARCE-NC: Rediscovering Egypt’s Lost Dinosaurs

Lecture Information

Reconstruction of the ~95-million-year-old ecosystem of the Bahariya Formation, Bahariya Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt, featuring several of its dinosaurs (Artwork by Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

Egypt’s material culture has long excited people around the world, but did you know that this region’s history stretches back well into the Mesozoic Era, or Age of Dinosaurs? In the early 20th century, a series of German expeditions recovered fossils of several new and extraordinary dinosaur species from the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert. Tragically, all these fossils were destroyed during a bombing of Munich in 1944. In 2000, a collaborative Egyptian-American research team became the first scientists to discover dinosaur fossils in the Bahariya Oasis in nearly a century. More recently, researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in have collected additional dinosaur fossils from Bahariya and have expanded their paleontological efforts to include geologically younger sites in the Kharga and Dakhla oases. These discoveries have cast unprecedented light on Egypt’s remarkable dinosaurs, restoring a scientific legacy that was lost during the Second World War.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Matt Lamanna is the Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and the senior dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He received his B.Sc. from Hobart College in 1997 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and 2004. Within the past 26 years, he has directed or co-directed field expeditions to Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, China, Croatia, Egypt, Greenland, and the western United States that have resulted in the discovery of more than 20 new species of dinosaurs and other fossil animals from the Cretaceous Period; indeed, he is one of only several people to have found dinosaur fossils on all seven continents. Lamanna served as chief scientific advisor to Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition and has appeared on television programs for PBS (NOVA), Discovery Channel, National Geographic, History Channel, A&E, Science Channel, and many more.

About ARCE-NC:

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