New dinosaur species emerges from pre-WWII fossil photosScientists made the discovery in studying images of remains that were destroyed by Allied bombing in Munich in 1944.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/01/26/dinosaur-tameryraptor-bombing-fossil-discovery/
Skeletal remains of Tameryraptor markgrafi are shown in an exhibition at the Alte Akademie. The photo of the exhibit was taken at an unspecified time before the material was destroyed in April 1944. (Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns)
Scientists have identified a previously unknown dinosaur species from an unlikely source: photographs of fossils destroyed during the Allied bombing of Munich in World War II.
Researchers announced the find in PLOS One, describing a unique species they propose calling Tameryraptor markgrafi. The predatory dinosaur lived in North Africa during the Cretaceous period about 95 million years ago.
In life, the dinosaur was a bit smaller than a Tyrannosaurus rex, at about 30 to 33 feet in length. It had a unique nasal horn and symmetrical teeth that it used to eat its prey, the researchers said.
Tameryraptor markgrafi was a predatory dinosaur that lived in North Africa during the Cretaceous period about 95 million years ago. (Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns)
The dinosaur may have lived millions of years ago, but the study reveals that its afterlife was affected by much more recent events in World War II. The specimen was excavated in Egypt in 1914 and described in the 1930s by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach, at the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology in Munich.
Stromer and his colleagues drew and photographed some of its bones and decided the creature was a member of the massive carnivorous genus Carcharodontosaurus, which was among the largest dinosaurs ever discovered.
But in 1944, the fossils’ fortunes changed when Allied bombers demolished a swath of Munich that included the Old Academy, which housed the fossil collection. The fossils were destroyed, with Stromer’s papers and photographs and a cast of the animal’s braincase the only clue they had ever existed.
Then, a modern-day researcher discovered a previously unknown photograph of the fossils in an archive at the University of Tübingen. When researchers compared the specimen with other dinosaurs from the genus Carcharodontosaurus and other closely related species, they realized that it had been misidentified.
“What we saw in the historical images surprised us all,” paleontologist Maximilian Kellermann, a PhD student at LMU München and the study’s first author, says in a news release. The dinosaur differed significantly from other Carcharodontosaurus, Kellermann says, which meant that Stromer’s original classification had been wrong. Instead, Kellermann says, the dinosaur was “a completely different, previously unknown predatory dinosaur species.” Its proposed name honors both “Tamery,” the ancient name for Egypt, and Richard Markgraf, who excavated the dinosaur in 1914.
The discovery shows the worth of reevaluating archival collections, the researchers say — and suggests that Cretaceous-era dinosaurs of North Africa were more diverse than once thought.
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