Paleontologist finds new dinosaur species

Paul Sereno, a 50-year-old academic, still plays in a sandbox -- only his is in the Sahara Desert.

The University of Chicago paleontologist and Naperville Central High School graduate has discovered a dozen new dinosaur species, among them the world's oldest and most primitive known dinosaur -- the Eoraptor, or "dawn raptor."

His February announcement of two distinct species of carnivorous dinosaurs, each as big as elephants, is the latest in a series of significant finds. He pieced the dinos together out of the 20-ton jumble of bones carted home from an expedition into the Sahara in 2000.

His team is still sifting through the fossils unearthed there almost a decade ago, making sense of what Sereno called "one of the greatest feats in paleontology," because of the amount of material found and the harsh working conditions.

In a recent interview, Sereno explained his new picture of Africa as it was millions of years ago.

He talked about the special artistry of knowing where to dig, an instinct that draws on his undergraduate training in studio arts at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

Then there's love -- and how he met his wife.

Q. Do you think you'll ever lead an expedition as eventful as the one in 2000?

A. I think I probably won't go on one that turns up as many discoveries over a single period of time. But in terms of difficulty, it wasn't as bad as some. I've got a great contract to write my story of our 1993 expedition. Although we did less on that trip, it was the hardest thing I ever did.

Q. How so?

A. We recovered the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in Africa, but in the midst of that was the Algerian Civil War. We had to get all the bones into a boat and get them out.

Meanwhile, they were killing foreigners because of the war. It was really scary getting out of there. Aside from all that, I met my wife on that trip.

Q. Adventure, romance -- sounds like it could make a good movie.

A. The movie rights have already been bought.

Q. They beat me to it. Now about the 2000 expedition, how did you happen upon that particular section of the Sahara?

A. We knew it was a rich area. Some French workers had found fossils in the distant past and I'd already started work there. But everything turned to gold that year. It was extraordinary.

Q. Why wasn't the area scoured before if it was known to be so rich?

A. Everyone knows about the T-Rex and other North American dinosaurs, because railroads were built here (unearthing the fossils).

Africa is very poor. The Sahara would knock the socks off anybody, but on an expedition you have to be able to feed 20 people for four months with just dehydrated foods. You have to know your water sources.

When we collected those finds, we had to drive them all the way out of the desert, thousands of miles to the coast -- and we had to do that several times. We probably moved 100 tons of rock by hand. Not a lot of people are willing to do all that.

Q. How did you motivate your team?

A. First of all, I took people with strong legs and good personalities, people who wanted to have fun. Then we were all out there and I told them, "You've read about history. This is your chance to write it."

Q. Where do you go from there? Do you just dig everything in sight?

A. You might see 100 fragments across an area the size of Illinois -- that's your playground. But for every 100, you only dig up five. It has to do with being able to see what you cannot see. Those five are the ones that you can see into the ground.

Q. So there's some imagination -- or intuition -- involved in digging successfully?

A. Most definitely. People have this artificial distinction between science and art. But nothing could be more visual than a field like paleontology. You know you'll never find everything. And the things you leave behind because you don't have the time -- you have a really big feeling that they're too fragmentary to affect the bigger picture.

Q. You're sensing a larger idea then, while you're out there, and making decisions based on that.

A. That's the eye of the artist. If you had asked me 20 years ago what I loved about my job, I probably would have said the science.

But now I would say what I really love most is the creativity of the science. How I can combine my art, how I can reconstruct animals.

Q. And these two new species whose existence you just announced -- what story are they telling us?

A. The main thing is that we have now discovered a set of three predators: the two we're naming with (a new) paper, and one we named before -- the Spinosaur. All three of these guys are big predators and they all lived together.

Q. Would that have been an uncommon occurrence -- three predators cohabitating?

A. Usually you have one large predator, or several predators that look alike. But the species we've found looked very different from each other. Three large animals that are bumping into each other -- they must have been dividing prey.

Q. So they ate and attacked in ways that helped each other?

A. Kryptops palaios (or "old hidden face") was a big, active attack predator with a rough face; and Eocarcharia dinops (or "fierce-eyed dawn shark") was a scavenger slicing predator, who would have eaten more like a shark.

Then there's Spinosaur, the species we announced earlier, who was eating fish but also coming out of the water. This triumvirate seems to have created a nice balance for the predatory world.

Q. Are there comparable triumvirates in the wild today?

A. We do see a cheetah and a lion, often with a jackal. That's a gross parallel. But among dinosaurs this doesn't seem to have been happening everywhere. It would have been a weird set by North American standards.

Q. But by African standards, not so strange?

A. We found a similar triumvirate higher (in the ground) than these guys -- so they would have been occurring later. We'll be announcing them soon.

In general, though, Africa was an isolated continent, and it's been hard to know what life was like on it. With this collection of new dinosaurs, we're beginning to see the biology of the place. This is a splendid view of something we've never seen before.