THE LOST DINOSAURS OF EGYPT

A mildly captivating but ultimately scattered account of the vicissitudes of fossil hunting.

The major problem is that this was apparently written by committee. Adventure writer Nothdurft (The Ghosts of Everest, not reviewed, etc.) gives credit to no fewer than five coauthors: three graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, one assistant professor at nearby Drexel University, and one “fossil preparator” at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. All five were principal members of the Bahariya Dinosaur Project, which in 1999 set out to follow in the footsteps of long-forgotten German aristocrat and scientist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbch whose pre-WWI explorations of the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert yielded the first fossils of huge sauropods in what was once a lush mangrove forest. Unfortunately, the unfocused text reads less like an account of the team’s collaboration than a meticulous accounting of their tiresome confabulations. The authors try to do two things at once, neither of them well. They open the German part of the story confusingly with an excessively long escription of the 1944 RAF mission that destroyed (purely as a matter of collateral damage) the Munich museum containing the bones from Bahariya, then circle back to chronicle Stromer’s expedition. The second narrative, of the contemporary scientific team who set out to restore Stromer’s legacy and register their own contributions, is even more diffuse. Slangy, not to say spacey, observations like those from fossil lab head Jason Poole (“it was like Bahariya was playing games with us”) or geologist Jennifer Smith (“these dinosaur guys . . . go up and down like they’re on a roller coaster”) do nothing to advance the reader’s understanding. If this were a term paper, which is about the length of the material here, the committee might rightly be accused of padding it.

Despite a lot of gravy and garnishes, there’s not much here but the bones.