Winter 2002

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DIGGING BIG A tyro scientist makes the find of a lifetime

by Karen Skolfield ’98G

STRIKING GOLD: Josh Smith '94 made headlines while still a grad student by finding the second-largest dinosaur-ever. (For excavation picture and larger view of Ben Barnhart portrait, click in right navigation.) WE WALK SLOWLY THROUGH THE Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, through the dinosaur section, taking our time. A large, skeletal Tyrannosaurus rex, tail outstretched, cocks its head as if considering whether we’re even worth the chase. Murals full of dinosaurs hunt in packs or singly, whole families of dinosaurs amid feathery trees, eggs forever in the process of hatching, the crucial cracking stage, the fossilized struggle to be born. A swarm of Latin speaks of power and nobility: king and thunder and tyrant, well-horned, great wonder, carnivorous bull, living fortress, terrible claw. It’s been almost two years since Joshua B.Smith ’94 discovered Paralititan stromeri, Stromer’s giant by the sea, now acknowledged as the second most massive dinosaur ever found: a herbivore that would have tipped, or flattened, the scales at nearly 80 tons. But at the time of our interview last summer it’s been just six weeks since Smith’s article appeared in the journal Science, six hard weeks of badgering by media people eager to know more about a 30-something paleontologist who was willing to follow a legend of bones into the Sahara. “I cannot believe the amount of press we got – it’s not like I cured cancer,” says Smith in his most insouciant 30-something tones. “Let’s put this in perspective: We found an animal that was dead 94 million years ago. The big news? It’s still dead.” Even as he makes this pronouncement, he smiles. It is a big deal, this juggle of bones – the kind of discovery every paleontologist hopes to make in his lifetime, and few do. Most remarkable is that it’s happened to Smith at this stage of his career, even before he’s left graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. And it happened in such an unlikely way. If you ask Smith for the short version of how Paralititan came to light, he will say this: He was lucky to love legends, he was blessed with Smith as a surname, and he stuck his head out the window of the Land Cruiser at exactly the right time. PALEONTOLOGY IS A DISCIPLINE RIFE with lore: a dinosaur discovered by a 14-year-old boy on vacation, near-perfect skeletal hoaxes, bones lost in transit, bones lost to political ideology, bones lost. One of these legends, that of Stromer’s lost dinosaurs, became Smith’s favorite. Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach was a German vertebrate paleontologist who had spent the formative part of his career in the Sahara Desert, in the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt. The dinosaurs he discovered there were unique, and uniquely odd, creatures. The most famous was the carnivorous Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the thorn lizard of Egypt, so named for the five-foot-tall crest of spines along its back. There are photos and published papers describing the skeleton of Spinosaurus, but nothing more: The majority of Stromer’s finds were destroyed in WWII bombing raids on Munich. Even before he knew the legend, Spinosaurus was Smith’s favorite dinosaur. In the early days of his graduate work at UPenn, when Smith and his friends spent hours speculating on the best spots for digs, Bahariya Oasis came up again and again. It hadn’t been explored by a paleontological team since Stromer’s time, yet given active digging throughout North Africa, it seemed that any fertile grounds would not have lain fallow this long. “We figured Egypt was out of reach,” Smith said. End of legend. Until, by chance, another Smith was needed. Josh Smith’s friend and fellow grad student Jen Smith, planning a trip to the Bahariya Oasis to do field work for her dissertation in geology, felt that as a woman traveling in a Muslim country she could use a male escort, preferably one who could pass as a relative. Her fellow Smith was totally up for it. “One of the things Don Wise drilled into me at UMass,” says Josh Smith, referring to his former, now emeritus, professor of geosciences here – “was ‘The one who sees the most rocks, wins.’ So I basically sign on for everything that comes down the pike. Which causes unending groans from my dissertation committee.” IN RETURN FOR HIS SERVICES as putative male relative, Jen gave Josh two days to follow Stromer’s legend into the desert. “Two days,” he says, groaning and shaking his head. Two days could be expected to yield no more than sand and more sand, and maybe a few bone bits the size of one’s thumb – if they were lucky. At first, they were amazingly unlucky. Smith had discovered the coordinates to Stromer’s last dig, but in the rush to prepare for the trip he’d written down the wrong numbers. (“We can’t lose; that is, we can’t lose if Josh copies down the coordinates correctly,” he says sheepishly.) This led them to wander the desert for the better part of a day, getting stuck in sand dunes, freezing in the Saharan winter. It was near day’s end when Josh, riding shotgun in the Land Cruiser, stuck his head out the window for relief from the mechanical heat inside. They drove over sand, past a burned log. It took a moment for him to realize that there are no burned logs in the desert. “It was a goddamn bone,” says Smith, awe still edging his voice – never mind that he’s told this story so many times he might as well set it to music. Never mind that two days before our interview he’d fielded a call from David Letterman. “Eighteen inches long. I looked at it, saw the pore structure, and said ‘It’s a dinosaur.’” EVENTUALLY, ON THE OTHER SIDE of the ridge, the pair located what they thought they’d been looking for: Stromer’s site, Gebel el Dist, and when Josh Smith returned six months later with a crew of 21 people, that was where he started digging. But the Gebel el Dist accumulations didn’t pan out; “We spent three weeks chasing shadows,” he says. Frustrated, he decided to explore the spot where he’d discovered the single bone. “We started digging, and in three hours we knew,” he says. “We were operating 17 or 18 quarries at the time we found Paralititan. I closed everything else down, and for the next 21 days we worked on Paralititan and got it out. “We were still in the quarry digging when our luggage went back to Cairo to go home. We were within hours of our window closing” – of having to shut down the dig whether they were finished or not. “I didn’t sleep for the whole seven weeks,” says Smith. “But we got it. We ended up processing 15,000 pounds of bones.” One notable bone that remains missing is the skull. Paralititan is a sauropod – “one of the long-necked, long-tail guys,” Smith calls it – and Sauropod skulls are notoriously brittle and loosely attached. Only a small percentage of them have been found with skulls. Still, it’s quite the thought, this massive, headless dinosaur come to rest, for a time, in Philadelphia. WE'RE AT THE ACADEMY OF Natural Sciences – a red-brick building with a dinosaur statue out front, in Central Philadelphia across the Schuylkill River from UPenn – because it’s with the dinosaur experts here that Paralititan is currently housed. It was here that the fossils were taken out of their plaster field jackets, disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled, a puzzle 94 million years old in which pieces are missing and no one knows what the final picture is supposed to be. Smith says they’ve managed to uncover about 20 percent of the skeleton, and it’s improbable that any more of this particular dinosaur will be found. The most impressive bone, a humerus or upper arm bone, leans against a wall in the Paleo Prep Lab, where Jason Poole, the lab’s manager and a naturalist who was a member of the expedition that uncovered the skeleton, is working. Paralititan’s humerus is an incredible 5’7” long and weighs 450 pounds. It’s hard to imagine such girth when the humerus of a human, my humerus, is an insubstantial nine inches. I look from my arm to the fossil and back again. Usually, Smith is a soi-disant carnivore researcher: “If it doesn’t kill to eat, I’m really not interested,” he quips. “How many brains does it take to sneak up on a blade of grass?” But Paralititan can hardly fail to command respect. The humerus of a carnivore is generally no more than a couple of feet long. When the humerus of this herbivore was unearthed – Smith working on one end, Poole on the other – it was days before they realized it was the same bone. Needless to say, there was much rejoicing in the camp that evening. “Did you say I could touch it?” I ask. They both nod. “Ninety-four million years old,” says Poole, as happily as if he’s pouring a finger of top-shelf Scotch. I’m wary of this 94-million-year-old thing, this fossil with its hairline cracks and history and all the weight it’s carried: the many tons of animal and now, the beginning of Smith’s career. It feels like porous china – I say this out loud and they smile approvingly – but what I don’t say is that it feels like time. It feels as if the record of the world might be contained beneath my hand. WHERE THESE BONES WERE FOUND adds to Paralititan’s mystique. Not only is Stromer’s giant the second most massive dinosaur known to science, it’s also the first known to have lived in a mangrove swamp. (Ninety million years ago, the Sahara was not arid: “It was pretty close to south Florida in climate,” Smith says.) Smith considers the second-tier size ranking provisional. The top contender for first place – the 80-100-ton herbivore Argentinosaurus, discovered in South America seven years ago – is “not that much bigger,” he says. And with only one Argentinosaurus and Paralititan yet found, who knows whether the difference is between species or individuals? “Do we have a small or a big Paralititan?” shrugs Smith. “This might be the second most massive, or this may be the smallest Paralititan and the big ones wiped the floor with Argentinosaurus. “We truly don’t know,” he says. “But it’s a big boy. Or girl. We honestly don’t know that either.” He grins. What we do know of Paralititan is impressive, given that Smith’s team spent just nine weeks at the site. Based on tooth marks in the fossils, we know the sauropod was scavenged postmortem. We know the environment supported nine or ten major types of carnivores, three of which were Tyrannosaurus-sized. "And that's rare," says Smith. “That’s an enormous number of predators. The biomass necessary to support them has to be bloody huge, which means this might be one of the most productive ecosystems of its time.” He grins again. “This might very well have been dinosaur heaven.” EVENTUALLY, MUCH OF PARALITITAN WILL return to Egypt. Smith will move on, too. Though his work on finds from Bahariya continues, he completed his doctorate at Penn last year and took up a new position as a researcher at Harvard. “The scary thing is, this is absolutely the brass ring,” he says. “Many people work their entire career and don’t pull this off.” At age 31, he’s discovered a new species and brought it home. What do you do for an encore? He waves his hand dismissively, his insouciant self again. “Now that I’ve done it, the pressure’s off,” he says. “I can let all the hype go away and actually get some work done.”

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