Colossal New Dinosaur Identified From Photos of Fossils Destroyed in WWII

Paleontologists usually find new dinosaur species in the ground, maybe surrounded by dirt, perhaps encased in sedimentary rocks. They don’t usually find them in pre-World War II photos, but according to a study published in the scientific journal PLOS One, researchers in Munich, Germany, did exactly that.

The original fossil was excavated from Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis in 1914 by Richard Markgraf and sent to Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in Munich. Stromer initially classified the dinosaur as a Carcharodontosaurus, a large predatory dino that lived in North Africa around 99 to 94 million years ago. Its name derives from Greek and means “sharp-toothed, or shark-toothed lizard.”

Around 30 years later, allied forces conducted air raids on Munich in our battle against the Nazis. Most of the collection was lost, including the fossilized Carcharodontosaurus. Only a handful of Stormer’s notes and a few pictures and illustrations survived.

Over 100 years later, the photos were found by Maximilian Kellerman, a master’s student at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Kellerman and his team noticed that the fossils looked just a little bit different from those we associate with the Carcharodontosaurus.

Eventually, they concluded that the dinosaur was a whole new species they named Tameryraptor markgrafi. The Tameryraptor is a combination of Latin and agent Egyptian and means “Thief from the beloved land.” The Markgrafi part, of course, honors Richard Markgraf.

The new species is thought to have been around 33 feet long, which would safely make it one of the largest carnivores to ever walk the earth.