GRESHKO: And you'd just start driving out to where there is no more road. He was on the other end of Nizar’s safety lecture and was just about to start looking for dinosaur bones. GWIN: This is my colleague, National Geographic science writer Michael Greshko. GRESHKO: So you start out in the town of Erfoud, Morocco.
We’ll follow Nizar out to his dig site in Morocco to solve a long-standing dinosaur mystery. This week: The strange tail of Spinosaurus. And this is Overheard at National Geographic: A show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have at Nat Geo, and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. I’m Peter Gwin, an editor at large at National Geographic magazine.
GWIN: OK, if you have a dinosaur book at home, break out the Wite- Out and turn to the page on Spinosaurus because Nizar has a few corrections to make-straight from the Sahara desert. That's when we realized that this was going to rewrite the dinosaur textbooks. And that's when we knew we were onto something really exciting. I had never seen anything like this before.
And it just kept going and going into the rock. And I thought, well, it's going to end any time now, but it got longer and longer. But the thing that really, really made my heart pound was when we excavated one of the tail bones from very close to the tip of the tail. GWIN: Wow, this is bone after bone of Spinosaurus? You always heard someone say “bone” somewhere. IBRAHIM: We hit the jackpot, and we found bone, after bone, after bone. Nizar discovered the first half of that skeleton in 2013, but the rest of the dinosaur was buried under tons of rock. As it turns out, there is only one known skeleton of Spinosaurus in existence.
And I remember this guy from a coloring book as the one with the big sail on its back. All right, I confess I was that kid who was way into dinosaurs. GWIN: The bones they hoped to be licking once supported the hulking body of a dinosaur called Spinosaurus. MICHAEL GRESHKO (WRITER): If it sticks, it’s bone.
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