Northern Cal. ARCE Lecture Dec. 15 by Matt Lamanna: Rediscovering Egypt's Lost Dinosaurs

The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a lecture by Dr. Matt Lamanna, Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Rediscovering Egypt's Lost Dinosaurs Sunday December 15, 2024, 3 PM  Pacific Standard Time Rm 56 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley This is an in-person lecture and is not virtual. The lecture will not be recorded. No registration is required Reconstruction of the ~95-million-year-old ecosystem of the Bahariya Formation, Bahariya Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt, featuring several of its dinosaurs (Artwork by Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History) About the Lecture: Egypt's vast archaeological record and engaging material culture have long excited people around the world, but did you know that this region's history stretches back well into the Mesozoic Era, or Age of Dinosaurs? In the early 20th century, a series of German expeditions recovered fossils of several new and extraordinary ~95-million-year-old dinosaur species from the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt's Western Desert, most famously the enormous sail-backed semi-aquatic predator Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Tragically, however, all these fossils were destroyed during a British Royal Air Force bombing of Munich in late April 1944. In 2000, a collaborative Egyptian-American research team became the first scientists to discover dinosaur fossils in the Bahariya Oasis in nearly a century; among these were a partial skeleton of a new and gigantic sauropod (long-necked plant-eating dinosaur) that was later named Paralititan stromeri. More recently, researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Mansoura, Egypt have collected additional, important dinosaur fossils from Bahariya, and moreover have expanded their paleontological efforts to include geologically younger (~75-million-year-old) sites in the Kharga and Dakhla oases. Foremost among their finds from the latter is another new sauropod, Mansourasaurus shahinae, which constitutes one of the best-preserved late Mesozoic-aged land-living backboned animals known from the entire African continent. Collectively, these discoveries have cast unprecedented light on Egypt's remarkable dinosaurs, helping to restore a scientific legacy that was lost during the Second World War. Matt Lamanna excavates the incomplete left humerus (= upper arm bone) of the gigantic, long-necked plant-eating dinosaur Paralititan stromeri in the Bahariya Oasis, February 2000 (Photo by Joshua Smith) About the Speaker: Dr. Matt Lamanna is the Mary R. Dawson Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and the senior dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally from the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, he received his B.Sc. from Hobart College in 1997 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and 2004. Within the past 26 years, he has directed or co-directed field expeditions to Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, China, Croatia, Egypt, Greenland, and the western United States that have resulted in the discovery of more than 20 new species of dinosaurs and other fossil animals from the Cretaceous Period, the third and final time period of the Age of Dinosaurs; indeed, he is one of only a handful of people to have found dinosaur fossils on all seven continents. Lamanna served as chief scientific advisor to Carnegie Museum of Natural History's $36M "Dinosaurs in Their Time" exhibition and has appeared on television programs for PBS (NOVA), the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the History Channel, A&E, the Science Channel, and many more. ---------------------- Parking is available in UC lots all day on weekends, for a fee. Ticket dispensing machines accept debit or credit cards. Parking is available in lots around the Social Sciences Building, and in lots along Bancroft. A map of the campus is available online at http://www.berkeley.edu/map/ . About ARCE-NC: For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE/, https://twitter.com/ARCENCPostings, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.