Blast From the Past Ibrahim sent the odd bone back to his lab. Maybe one day he’d figure out what animal the bones came from. T en a year later, he was visiting some colleagues in Italy. T ey wanted to show him some odd bones they’d gotten from a fossil dealer. In the basement of a museum, Ibrahim


saw leg bones, ribs, and vertebrae. He also saw long, flat spines. T ese bones reminded Ibrahim of a picture he’d seen in a children’s book as a boy. It showed a dinosaur with a giant sail on its back, a Spinosaurus. A German scientist had dug up the bones


of this odd dinosaur in the Sahara 100 years earlier. It was bigger than T. rex. It had long jaws and sharp teeth shaped like cones. Huge spines held up a sail on its back. Not much was known about Spinosaurus,


though. Only two partial skeletons had ever been found. T ey were sent to a museum in Germany, which displayed one of them. T en disaster struck. During World War II,


planes dropped bombs on Germany. T ey destroyed the museum and its Spinosaurus bones. Only some of the scientist’s notes, sketches, and photos survived. T e bones on the museum table looked


a lot like the ones in the sketches. “My jaw dropped,” Ibrahim says. He never imagined he’d get to see even a part of a Spinosaurus!


Mission Impossible? Ibrahim’s excitement soon gave way to dismay. He wanted to know more about Spinosaurus, but he had a problem. No one knew where the fossils in Italy had come from. Without that information, Ibrahim faced an impossible mission to learn more. Bones only tell part of the story. Scientists


need other clues to make inferences and fill in the blanks. Knowing where Spinosaurus lived could help Ibrahim think about how the dinosaur interacted with its ecosystem. T en he could use what he knew about modern-day ecosystems to predict patterns of interaction between prehistoric living things. As Ibrahim studied the bones, he started to


find clues. He saw purple sandstone streaked with yellow on some bones. He noticed the spine bones looked a lot like his mystery fossil. Maybe it came from a Spinosaurus, too. And maybe that bone and this skeleton came from the same place. To find out, all he had to do was find the man who sold him the bone a few years earlier.


Lucky Find Ibrahim knew it was a crazy idea. He didn’t know the man’s name or address. All he knew was that the man had a mustache. It wasn’t much to go on. Even so, Ibrahim returned to Morocco.


He visited active dig sites in the Sahara. He returned to the desert town where he bought the bone. He asked everyone if they’d seen the man with the mustache. No one knew him. Ready to give up, Ibrahim sat at a café on


This odd fossil led Ibrahim on a quest to solve a dinosaur mystery.


12 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SCIENCE EXPLORER


his last day. A man walked by. Ibrahim saw his face. He had a mustache. Ibrahim’s heart beat wildly. He chased the man. It was the fossil dealer! Now, he just had to convince the man to lead him to where he’d found the bones.


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