To understand the drive that fuels paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, just ask his longtime mentor, British paleobiologist Dave Martill, about one of their early expeditions. It was 2008, and their team was hours away from the nearest village in the sweltering, empty deserts of Morocco. They had come to analyze ancient sediment layers, not to hunt dinosaurs. But Ibrahim, then in his mid-20s, spotted an enormous fossilized bone on a steep slope.
The team wasn’t prepared to excavate a fossil, never mind one weighing about a hundred pounds. They didn’t even have plaster of Paris — a paleontologist’s go-to goo to prep fossils for transport from the field. Ibrahim was undeterred.
“He said, ‘I must have this,’ ” says Martill, with a sigh, from his office at England’s University of Portsmouth. By Martill’s reckoning, he had to drive “about a hundred miles” to find even building plaster, a poor prepping substitute. And the arduous work of excavating and plastering the fossil was not the end of the saga, Martill recalls: “Building plaster’s got clay in it and takes ages to dry, so we looked for firewood — which is not easy to find in a desert — dug a trench on either side of the bone and lit fires to encourage it to dry.”
The team then hauled the fossil in a makeshift stretcher down the slope to their Land Rover. The vehicle had to carry not just the bone and the researchers, but all of the expedition’s equipment and supplies.
