by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent last night mostly
watching TV, including the Jeopardy! show (a rerun of a Teachers’ Tournament they originally telecast last
year!) and a couple of nature documentaries on PBS. One of the shows PBS ran
last night on their “Mental Wednesdays” or whatever they call them was a NOVA
program (sponsored by,
among others, “The David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science” — which
embitters me because I can’t help but think of the other fund, the David and Charles Koch Super-Pac to
Donate Billions to Politicians who Deny Science just so that people in the fossil-fuel energy business like the
Kochs can continue to make money off the pollution and despoliation of the
earth and its atmosphere in blithe disregard of the horrific changes people are
causing in the climate by staying on our collective fossil-fuel “jones”) called
“Bigger than T. Rex,”
telling the fascinating story of a dinosaur discovered in 1910 in Egypt by a
German paleontologist named Ernst Stromer, a predator he called Spinosaurus because of its huge spines, which almost certainly
supported a sail-like membrane, which was not only bigger than Tyrannosaurus
rex but about half again its
size. Alas, Stromer’s specimen — the only even partially complete one ever
found until recently — was destroyed when the Munich Museum of Natural History,
at which the bones he’d found were displayed, was bombed by the Allies in 1944
as part of World War II.
What’s more, only one photo existed of the display, so paleontologists
trying to figure out what Spinosaurus had been like — and, even more importantly, what it had eaten, since
there hadn’t been similar finds of herbivorous dinosaurs (the usual food source
for their carnivorous brethren) in the area — were at sea until recently, when
an Italian fossil trader contacted Christiano dal Sasso of the Natural History
Museum in Milan with a large number of Spinosaurus fossil bones he had acquired from a bootleg trader
in Morocco. Nizar Ibrahim, the closest thing this show has to a hero (he’s
drop-dead gorgeous with a nice basket, and he explains that since he’s part
Moroccan and part German, he feels he has a vested interest in Spinosaurus), gets involved and manages to contact the trader
even though the knowledge that he was dealing in dinosaur bones could get him
prosecuted by the Moroccan government (Morocco allows a free trade in common
fossils but not in rare specimens) —
obviously, the fact that he speaks Arabic was a major help — and the dealer
leads him to the site where he dug up his bones and thus the professional
paleontologists are able not only to get more Spinosaurus bones but to do a proper excavation, including
noting what strata of rock they’re in and thus getting a rough idea of the
specimen’s age. They were able to get enough of the specimen that, between what
they had, what they could deduce from the surviving photos and descriptions of
Stromer’s finds, and analogies to living animals (including flamingos and, more
significantly, crocodiles), the paleontologists deduced that Spinosaurus had been an aquatic reptile, many times larger
than the modern crocodile but similarly adapted to spending most of its time
underwater and subsisting on fish (which also were much larger in the late
Cretaceous period in which it lived than they are now). The combination of war,
skullduggery and scientific fascination made this a quite compelling program to
watch even though I wondered about their assertion that no previously known dinosaur had spent much of its
time in water; what about Apatosaurus (which when I went to school was known as Brontosaurus), which as early as the 1930’s was known to have
been amphibian?
