The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt, by William Northdruft with Josh Smith

I recommend this book highly. It can be purchased at Amazon, or can be ordered, via interlibrary loan if your own library doesn't carry it.


Here's the table of contents:

MAP OF EGYPT

Prologue: Death and Ressurection
1. Reaping the Whirlwind
2. The Bone-hunting Aristocrat
3. Unearthing a Legend
4. Dragomen, Follsils and Fleas
5. The Road to Bahariya
6. Finds and Losses
7. Sand, Wind and Time
8. The Hill Near Death
9. Solving Stromer's Riddle
10. Lost World of the Lost Dinosaurs

Epilogue: Memorials
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

In 1911, German paleontologist Dr. Ernst Stromer found bones of 3 new dinosaurs in Egypt. The bones were excavated and sent to Germany. Irreplaceable, they were destroyed in 1944 when British bombers bombed Munich, and a stray bomb destroyed the museum where they were housed.

No casts of these bones had ever been sent anywhere else - so the bones were gone.

In 2000, a group of paleontologists traveled to Egypt to find the site where Stromer had dug, and try to see if they could find anything he had missed (which was possible, as there'd been only 3 excavating seasons before WWI, and after WWI Germany was too poor to sponsor any scientists to continue the work, and after WWII, they had other priorities.)

This book tells the story of that ultimately successful quest.



If I were to rank this on ascale of one to ten T-rex skulls, I'd give it a 7 and a half.

This is because the beginning chronology of the book irks me. I like things to be covered in chronological order, but the first few chapters alternate between 1911-14, and the 2000 expedition, as if the writer didn't trust his material to keep the reader fascinated all on its own.

Stromer is a tragic figure. A German aristocrat, he defied Hitler and the Nazis. To pay him back, when his 3 sons joined the army they were all sent to their deaths on the Russian front. (One did survive the war, and lived for five years in a Russian prison camp after war's end, as a few million German soldiers were also - used as slave labor in payback for how their compatriots had treated the Russians.)

Stromer lived to see his life's work destroyed, but also lived long enough to learn that his third son had indeed survived the war, gotten married, and presented him with a grand daughter.

Excavating in Egypt in 2000 was a difficult process (and worse now, no doubt), and we learn a great deal about excavating practices then and now, and about the world the Egyptian dinoasurs lived in back then. (No grass, just plants. And so on.)

Highl recommended.