Beer, bones, Bahariya Oasis make up ‘Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt’
Graduate students and paleontologists from the University of Pennsylvania discover dinosaur bones of a new species, Paralititan, in the western deserts of Egypt.
By Ellen Gray
Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA — Maybe someday there’ll be a historic marker outside the New Deck Tavern on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

“Plans for the expeditions that led to the discovery of Paralititan, the second-largest species of known dinosaurs, were first hatched here by two lowly graduate students, Josh Smith and Matt Lamanna, in 1998.”

But then, the plaque might be placed outside Penn’s Hayden Hall, where, according to an alternate account, Smith and Lamanna sat in Lamanna’s office and first came up with the idea of looking for dinosaur remains in the Bahariya Oasis, a section of Egypt’s western desert where German scientist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach discovered four new species in 1911.

It’s unlikely that the latter marker would mention the six-pack of beer the pair were working their way through, but beer’s as good a place as any to begin the story of “The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt,” an A&E documentary airing Tuesday (7 p.m. CDT).

“All good scientific discoveries start with beer,” declares Smith, 32. And who’s going to argue, other than a reporter trying to figure out why the dinosaur-hunters have floated two different stories about the genesis of their particular discovery?

“I honestly don’t remember what happened when or where,” Lamanna, 27, confessed last week in an e-mail relayed through an A&E spokeswoman. “It was several years ago and we were drinking a lot, to boot.”

The story of the discovery of Paralititan — the name means “tidal giant” — is one of those stories full of accidents, coincidences and pure dumb luck that you’d expect to see if Fox or the WB set out to make a series about attractive young paleontologists.

It’s simply not credible that Smith, a former Army Reservist, managed — in the two days allotted for his research — to spot some large bone fragments lying out in the open. Much less that those fragments would turn out to be from the leg of a very large plant-eating dinosaur.

It’s even less credible that when he returned a year later, leading an expedition of his own, he, Lamanna and their colleagues would find enough of that dinosaur’s skeleton to conclude that they were dealing with a previously unknown species.

Incredible, but true.

After discovering the first bones, Smith put together a 14-member expedition, funded by Cosmos Studios.

The focus of A&E’s documentary is the story of that expedition, and it’s one with a surprising amount of suspense.