Carcharodontosaurus
Carcharodontosaurus saharicus “Shark-toothed reptile”
Stats
Type: theropod (meat-eater)
Age: 90 million years old
Skull length: 5.5 feet
Length: 45 feet
Discovery Site: Morocco
Notes
Carcharodontosaurus is Africa’s answer to Tyrannosaurus. One of the largest carnivores that ever walked on earth, Carcharodontosaurus, had 6-inch-long serrated teeth. Sereno and his team unearthed the Carcharodontosaurus skull in the Moroccan Sahara in 1995, solving a mystery borne from the destruction of World War II.
At the beginning of this century, fragmentary bones and some serrated teeth were discovered in Egypt and described in scientific literature. Collected by Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in central Egypt, these bones and teeth were housed in Munich’s Bavarian State Collections of Paleontology and Historical Geology. On the night of April 24, 1944, a Royal Air Force bombing run destroyed the dinosaur fossils, leaving modern paleontologists to wonder what kind of dinosaurs those fossils had come from. Sereno solved the mystery when he matched the teeth in the Carcharodontosaurus skull with the literature descriptions of the Egyptian fossils destroyed in Munich over a half-century ago.
