Pittsburgh-based dinosaur expert helps discover fossil of bizarre creature

Just imagine a 20-foot-long, meat-eating dinosaur with a smashed-in, bulldog-like face with small teeth, walking around on its hind legs and its short arms flailing away.

This month, an Egyptian-American team of researchers, including a Pittsburgh-based dinosaur expert, announced the discovery of this new kind of dinosaur from a fossil site in Egypt’s Sahara Desert. It’s part of an unidentified species within the family of the abelisaurid group of theropods.

A theropod is a dinosaur group distinguished by hollow bones and three-toed limbs — and they were the biggest carnivores around. What makes this finding unique, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, is it occurred in the Bahariya Formation, a rock unit in the Bahariya Oasis of Northeastern Africa that dates to the Cretaceous Era (about 98 million years ago).

Fossils of abelisaurids (carnivorous bipeds) only had been found in Europe and in today’s Southern Hemisphere continents, but never before from the Bahariya Formation.

The fossil in question was unearthed during a 2016 expedition, but it has taken the past six years to go through the process of verifying exactly what it was.

The research team included Matt Lamanna, who is the Mary R. Dawson associate curator and lead dinosaur specialist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Their work was supported by a grant to Lamanna from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

Lamanna said the fossil, a vertebra, is well preserved.

“What’s cool about this particular find is that this is a group of dinosaurs that was extraordinarily weird looking. We sort of expected to find this group there,” said Lamanna.

“The Bahariya has taken on near-legendary status among paleontologists for having produced the first-known fossils of some of the world’s most amazing dinosaurs,” he said. “But for more than three-quarters of a century, those fossils have existed only as pictures in old books.”

That’s because fossils found at the site in the early 20^th century by members of a German expedition were destroyed in a World War II bombing where the fossils were kept.

But now, there’s a record of a dinosaur group in that specific time and place.

“During the mid-Cretaceous, the Bahariya Oasis would’ve been one of the most terrifying places on the planet,” said Hesham Sallam, a professor at American University in Cairo and part of the research team. “How all these huge predators managed to coexist remains a mystery, though it’s probably related to their having eaten different things, their having adapted to hunt different prey.”

Lamanna said the fossil will remain in Egypt. In the meantime, the search for dinosaurs will continue in the Bahariya Oasis.

“One of the things we hope to find is more bones of this particular critter, to the point where we can understand a little bit more about it,” he said. “Right now, we know it’s an abelisaurid. We know it belongs to this family of meat-eating dinosaurs. But we don’t know what species it belongs to (or) whether it’s a new species.”

Lamanna said some abelisaurids have horns and bumps on their skulls, like the ones in the “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom” and “Jurassic World Dominion” movies.

“We would love to find skull material of this so we could answer that question. If we were fortunate enough to find a skeleton of this dinosaur, even a significant part of a skeleton of this dinosaur, it’s a virtual certainty that we would be able to learn much more about it.”