Maier - African Dinosaurs Unearthed: The Tendaguru Expeditions

AFRICAN DINOSAURS
UNEARTHED

LIFE OF THE PAST
JAMES O. FARLOW, EDITOR

AFRICAN
DINOSAURS
UNEARTHED

THE TENDAGURU EXPEDITIONS

Gerhard Maier

THIS BOOK IS A PUBLICATION OF

Indiana University Press
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2003 by Gerhard Maier

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maier, Gerhard, date
African dinosaurs unearthed : the Tendaguru expeditions / Gerhard Maier.
p. cm. (Life of the past)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34214-7 (alk. paper)
1. Animals, FossilTanzania. 2. PaleontologyMesozoic. 3. Scientific expeditionsTanzaniaHistory20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
QE731 .M25 2003
560.9678dc21
2002015732

1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04 03

TO COLLEEN

Who understood bow important it was.

Photographs follow pages 82 and 178.

More than two dozen principalities on a plain bordering a northern sea unite to form a country that rapidly became prosperous. People in the new country, seeking adventure and knowledge, begin to explore a region located on a continent in the distant tropics. A man searching for minerals there finds pieces of giant bones near a steep hill. The amazing discovery comes to the attention of a professor who lives in the northern country. He has seen huge bones taken from the ground and assembled into giant skeletons in another country beyond an ocean to the west. The professor travels over land and sea to the distant hill in the tropics and finds huge quantities of giant bones scattered over the ground. Very excited, he returns to his country and tells the director of a famous museum about the hill with all the bones. The director speaks to princes, to community leaders, and to captains of industry. They all agree that an expedition should be sent to the faraway hill in the tropics.

In such manner began the greatest intercontinental expedition ever to collect dinosaurs. The discovery was made in 1907 at Tendaguru in what is now southeastern Tanzania, thirty-six years after the unification of Germany. The centenary of the discovery is now approaching. The story of that expedition and the British expedition that followed may be told in numbers: funding, people, ledgers, specimens, casts, boxes, and weights. These details are important, for they address the scope and results of the excavations. But with only that information, the story would remain incompletemore fundamental is the fire that caused people to dedicate themselves to its success.

It was a question of national honor. German researchers who participated in the expedition later died in the defense of their colony. A dinosaur, Dryosaurus lettow-vorbecki, was named in homage to the officer who directed its defense. Has any other dinosaur ever been named after a general? Many years later, old men could be found in the Tanzanian bundu (bush) who would proudly say, Once I was a German soldier. After a war and a depression, a German paleontologist returned to Steep Hill to be warmly welcomed by men who had worked there in the quarries. A leader of British excavations humbly confessed his ignorance of bone morphology and requested instruction that never came; another worked until he died. How often it was said of a European that he labored in the tropical lowlands of east Africa until his health was broken. And how many families, German, English, and Tanzanian, were separated by months and years of fatigue and loneliness because of the giant bones of Tendaguru.

For Germany, the half-century from 1909 included nearly thirteen years of totalitarian government, ten years of disastrous war, and ten years of economic turmoil. Museums and collections were destroyed; the scientific community and their families were decimated by death and emigration. Yet the period also saw the cleaning and preservation of Tendaguru fossils through an effort equal to half that invested in the field work; the construction of five dinosaur mounts, including one that remains the largest reconstructed dinosaur skeleton in the world; and the publication of the expeditions monographs. Paleontological research rose from the ashes.

Much has been written about good government, and history amply demonstrates that it is humanitys greatest challenge. Similarly, the heroic efforts at Tendaguru are worthy of the attention of those who would collect dinosaurs. They were inspired by love of country and a love of knowledge. To keep that vision clean, it was necessary to compensate as much as possible for an array of inevitable human failings. At Tendaguru, success followed the clear identification of individual responsibilities, and the encouragement of collegiality and consultation. In a multicultural setting, multilingual participants were essential. So was adequate nourishment.

In modern laboratories, lined with expensive technological devices, researchers still probe the contents of casts made so long ago at Tendaguru. Their vision is enormously extended by their instruments. They see and understand the implications of microscopic spores and pollen, of microlaminae of bone deposited in osteons, of mineral particles, and even of isotopes of atoms. The detail on such small scales seems to collapse the separation in time between the researchers and the archaic materials they study to zero.

On a human scale, missionaries, health workers, and teachers continue to labor in the service of others in the region of the faraway hill in the tropics. Across the bundu, the dry season prevails. Leafless forests are compressed between a burned-grass floor and a vault of electric blue. The bite of the tsetse fly is powerful, and that of the mosquito, lethal. Nearby, but 150 million years away in time, forests of flowerless trees line a subtropical coast. Their sparse crowns decorated with sinuous, reptilian fronds are slowly being stripped by giraffoid giants. On tidal wetlands between the forest and the sea, huge, dismembered bones and broken, knife-like teeth lie baking beneath a younger dry-season sun. The stench of decay, of both vegetation and flesh, wafts through the salty air.

The apparent rupture is artificial, for the two scenes are bound together in a continuum of space and time. The continuum lies at the root of the mystery of our existence within a world that vastly exceeds human dimensions and lifespans. A conviction that the multidimensionality of space-time is understandable and that knowledge is useful, opens the world to exploration. The effort will be costly, but the cost will be eclipsed by what is gained. The epic of the great expedition is now lost in time. It will never be repeated, for only the birth of a country could have sustained it. Its memory, however, lingers in those who cherish it, and in the fortunate few who can say, Once, I too climbed Tendaguru Hill.