Carcharodontosaurus is Africa's answer
to Tyrannosaurus. One of the largest carnivores
that ever walked on earth, Carcharodontosaurus,
had 6-inch-long serrated teeth. Sereno and his
team unearthed the Carcharodontosaurus skull in the Moroccan
Sahara in 1995, solving a mystery borne from
the destruction of World War II.
At the beginning of this century, fragmentary
bones and some serrated teeth were discovered
in Egypt and described in scientific literature.
Collected by Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in
central Egypt, these bones and teeth were housed
in Munich's Bavarian State Collections of Paleontology
and Historical Geology. On the night of April
24, 1944, a Royal Air Force bombing run destroyed
the dinosaur fossils, leaving modern paleontologists
to wonder what kind of dinosaurs those fossils
had come from. Sereno solved the mystery when
he matched the teeth in the Carcharodontosaurus skull with the literature descriptions of the
Egyptian fossils destroyed in Munich over a half-century
ago. |
