In Egypt’s ‘Land of Death,’ Dinosaurs Were Supersized—and Hungry

When Belal Salem visited the Bahariya Oasis for the first time, he felt he was on hallowed ground. Traveling deep into Egypt’s Western Desert to a sprawling valley dotted with guava and mango farms, Salem was retracing the steps taken more than a century earlier by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer, whose team had discovered some of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found. The experience was overwhelming for Salem, a master’s student in vertebrate paleontology at Mansoura University in the country’s north. “I couldn’t feel my legs,” he says. Though he felt the weight of Stromer’s accomplishments, Salem was determined to make his own contribution to the field.

Salem got his chance recently when he and colleagues identified a new dinosaur from Bahariya based on a distinctive single bone. It took two years for the team to free the specimen, found in 2016, from surrounding sedimentary rock and iron. Once exposed, says Salem, the fossil was unmistakable: a vertebra from a theropod. This group includes all known carnivorous dinosaurs, from velociraptors to T. rex. The tall, thin shape of the neural arch—the ring of bone that held the spinal cord in place—established that the specimen belonged to a minibus-sized theropod called an abelisaurid, possibly a scavenger or small-game hunter. Salem and his coauthors described the discovery in a paper recently published in Royal Society Open Science.

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