Dr. Paul Serino

Still to come in this podcast... Another team member brushed against a bone that was sticking out of the ground and comes up, what do you think this is?

And it's the crest of this dinosaur.

We knew we had a new species.

I've been to Niger a bunch, but there was one spot I wanted to get to.

I found it in a 600-page monograph in French, a geologist who had described the heart of the Sahara.

And in one line in this monograph in French, he said, I found a dagger-shaped tooth.

It looks like Cercarodontosaurus.

Nothing more was said.

There were no drawings, no photographs, and the tooth was lost.

But there was that line, and I couldn't let it go.

I tried to get there a couple times, but it was impossible.

There were sand seas in between where I was.

My chance came in 2019.

We come back, having found this site, but exhausted it.

Man walks into our camp.

Through a couple languages, he says he can take us somewhere, but it's farther.

So we followed him and he pulls up to this incredible fossil field.

Back in the laboratory, those bones turned out to be the jaws of Spinosaurus.

And it did look slightly new, but we weren't sure.

And so we returned.