14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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Bidding for dinosaurs
Rushdi Said * examines the publicity maelstrom surrounding the Bahariya find
On 1 June many leading US newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, announced that the bones of a giant plant-eating dinosaur had been unearthed in the desert surrounding Bahariya Oasis. According to the papers and the statements made by the leader of the University of Pennsylvania expedition, who announced the discovery, the dinosaur appears to be the second largest on record. The creature lived in and around the swamps and mud flats along the shores of the sea that washed the Bahariya area some 94 million years ago.
The publication of this find as front- page news in some of the US's most prestigious papers aroused great interest and prompted speculation as to its authenticity and significance. It seemed difficult to believe that such a find could have escaped the scrutiny of the generations of geologists who surveyed, mapped and examined the Egyptian desert during the past century. What, sceptics wondered, was so special about this find anyway? The publication of the results in the leading American scientific journal Science did not allay the doubts. Was all the attention simply part of a public relations campaign?
There is no doubt that the find is authentic. The dinosaur belongs to a previously unknown species found on a site where other equally important species were unearthed a century ago. The bone beds of the Bahariya area, from which the new find was extracted, have been known since German vertebrate paleontologist Stromer von Reichenbach of Munich, who conducted extensive fieldwork in Egypt from the beginning of the century until the outbreak of World War I, discovered and studied them. He was also responsible for the discovery of other bone beds in Wadi Natrun, Wadi Al- Faregh and the Mahamid area along the Nile Valley. The results of his work on Bahariya were published in a large monograph in 1914. In that work Stromer described the remains of the only dinosaur ever recorded in Egypt, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. I found the record so significant and the description of the rock at Gebel Al-Dist from which the fossil was extracted so complete that I took that section as the type for similar rocks from this age in Egypt in my 1962 book The Geology of Egypt. In that work, I dubbed the bed from which the dinosaur bones were extracted the dinosaur bed.
In addition to the dinosaur, Stromer found rich vertebrate fauna associated with it, including plesiosaurs, amphibians, snakes, turtles and crocodiles. The dinosaur he described was not a small creature: its estimated length was 20 to 25m, and it weighed 45 or 50 tons. The beast was carnivorous. In this respect, it was different from the newly discovered dinosaur. Stromer concluded from the study of the associated fauna and the large assortment of tropical plants that this beast must have lived in near a shore line, in an environment lush with tropical plants. Interestingly, Stromer's age assignment of these beds was correct. His entire find was taken out of Egypt and stored in the Munich Museum, which was destroyed in 1944 by an Allied air raid. The ruined museum also held the valuable fossil collection of the 1874 Rholf Expedition to the Western Desert.
The most recent discovery, then, adds to our knowledge of Bahariya's history, but does not explain the great publicity the find has received. The article in Science may offer a clue, though. The lead author is Joshua Smith, who was responsible for fund-raising. Five of the eight contributors are young graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania, who formed the core of the expedition. The sixth is Professor Robert Giegengack, who visits Egypt regularly and has dabbled in its geology since he wrote his PhD dissertation on the Nubian Desert some 40 years ago. The last author on the list is Youssri Attiya, a young Egyptian paleontologist from the Egyptian Geological Survey, who was not consulted before the results were published, and who announced the find in Cairo independently, to protest the release of information without the Survey's consent or permission. He complained that the expedition had broken an agreement with the Survey, under whose auspices the work was carried out.
Perhaps the expedition was forced to breach the agreement and make the early announcement because of commitments to financial donors. MPH Entertainment and Cosmos Studios agreed to underwrite the funding in order to film a documentary on "the lost dinosaurs of Egypt," due to be aired on the A&E channel in 2002. The fact that the influential Anne Druyan, the widow of astronomer/author Carl Sagan, is also head of Cosmos Studios may explain the extensive publicity the find has received.
Whether the Egyptian Geological Survey authorities knew of these arrangements is unclear. Clearly, however, the clash this particular project has caused will prompt the Survey to lay down new rules making scientific cooperation with foreign organisations more beneficial to both parties. Unclear also is the fate of the bones and other materials unearthed. Will they remain in laboratories in the US, or be returned to Cairo and placed in the Geological Museum?
The story of the Bahariya dinosaur is the story of modern science as part of the market economy, dependent on funding from any source that can provide it. It is certainly different from the science that Stromer conducted a century ago, when only a few colleagues noticed his even greater discovery, made in an area he had to reach by camel and under extremely difficult conditions. Until the mid-1970s, science was funded largely by governments, semi-governmental foundations or private endowments, which allocated grants solely on the merits of the research proposal presented. Publicity was avoided, because -- as experience had shown -- it inevitably leads to demagoguery and bad science.
* The writer is the former head of the Egyptian Geological Survey authority.
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