This week marks 200 years since dinosaurs were officially discovered, and experts see huge potential for new discoveries in the Middle East
The Middle East has been singled out as holding the key to the next generation of unthinkable breakthroughs in the field of palaeontology, as fossil hunters mark 200 years since dinosaurs were officially discovered.
From meat-eating dinosaurs in Egypt and three-toed footprints in Jordan to the wealth of fossils and amber preserved inside Lebanon’s quarries, the Middle East is becoming a new playground for palaeontologists.
With more than 2,000 species of dinosaurs having been identified over the past 200 years, the knowledge held by experts has vastly developed since English naturalist and theologian William Buckland officially announced the discovery of a new ancient reptile on February 20, 1824.
University of Edinburgh palaeontologist Professor Steve Brusatte, who was an adviser on the movie Jurassic Park, says there is still much more to discover.
“His [Buckland’s] announcement opened the floodgates and started a fossil rush, and people went out looking for other giant bones in England and beyond,” he told media.
Dr Benjamin Kear, the curator of vertebrate palaeontology and researcher in palaeontology at the Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden, was part of the team that discovered the first evidence of dinosaurs in Saudi Arabia in 2014.
Now working on a new project in Lebanon, he has heralded the Middle East as the key to unlocking more hidden secrets about dinosaurs, describing it as a “goldmine” which has the potential to create a “real-life Jurassic Park”.
“Dinosaurs went everywhere. The fossils will be there but the problem has been that people have not been able to look. Myself and my colleague have worked all across the Middle East just trying to find traces of this long-lost world,” he told media.
Dr Kear and his team found teeth and bones dating from around 72 million years ago in the northwestern part of Saudi Arabia, along the coast of the Red Sea.
They belonged to two types of dinosaurs, a bipedal meat-eating abelisaurid distantly related to a Tyrannosaurus but smaller, and a plant-eating titanosaur which could have been up to 20 metres in length.
“It is a gold mine of future exploration. Dinosaur fossils are everywhere across the Middle East.
“The ideal place to look is the Middle East, it is one of the undiscovered areas. The possibilities are endless,” said Dr Kear.
“My recent work is in Lebanon. People sell fossils and we have been working directly with fossil hunters as they are sitting on huge collections of spectacular stuff and we are helping them see the value of turning it into geotourism.
“With the limestone layers in Lebanon we can get a snapshot of what was going on in the Middle East 90 million years ago. It is a real-world Jurassic Park. We are looking for the protein residue that has been preserved in the amber so we can push the boundaries. The Middle East is at the cutting edge of what will be the real Jurassic Park.
“It is a long way off but the science is developing at an accelerating rate. The things coming up in the future will be very exciting. Who knows where we will be in another 200 years time.”
Dinosaur research has come a long way in 200 years.
Dr Kear’s work is building on the discovery made by Buckland, who in 1824 addressed the Geological Society of London, describing an enormous jaw and limb bones which had been unearthed in a slate quarry in the village of Stonesfield, near Oxford.
He recognised that the fossils belonged to a huge bygone reptile, and gave it a formal scientific name Megalosaurus, meaning “great lizard.”
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