Paleontology Whiz No Ordinary Bone Collector
Paul Sereno broke the news to his team at an oasis deep in the Sahara Desert.
After years of planning, a 1,500-mile drive through the desert and a month of bureaucratic wrangling, the dinosaur hunter was at the breaking point.
His expedition was over. The money was gone, the hard-to-get approval from the government of Niger wasn’t coming and the political situation was unstable at best.
On little more than a hunch, the University of Chicago paleontologist had dared the group to follow him in 1993 into central Niger to dig for dinosaur fossils.
Three years earlier, on the surface of a forbidding stretch of desert, Sereno made out the backbone of one dinosaur and traces of others. But he had had no time to dig, no time to confirm his intuition. Yet Sereno knew there was something there, something big.
Now, with his team gathered around him, he faced defeat. His response was typical Sereno: He began laughing out loud.
“I thought, ‘What, are you crazy? This is what it’s about,’ ” he remembers.
Over the next 48 hours, though, Sereno’s persistence paid off. Approval from the government came through. Cash needed to keep the expedition alive arrived. Though time was running short and half his team--including some of the more experienced scientists--left, Sereno went ahead.
“It was an adventure, and it was unexplored,” he said. “It was irresistible.”
‘A Little Bit of Indiana Jones’
In his short career, Sereno, 42, has proved himself no ordinary dinosaur hunter. He has launched six expeditions into the deserts of Niger, Morocco and Argentina and has unearthed six new dinosaur species. His goal is to push “back the veil” on the southern continents, where the history of dinosaurs remains to be written.
Recently he announced his latest find: a 135-million-year-old plant-eating dinosaur unearthed on that 1993 central Niger dig.
His teams regularly work 12-hour days in temperatures hovering near 125 degrees, digging for bones with chisels and picks. Where Sereno digs, there are no modern conveniences. In 1997 his team used a rudimentary pulley system to hoist 25 tons of bone into the back of a truck.
The boyish paleontologist--who even his father admits “has a little bit of the Indiana Jones appearance”--has also made a splash in the research world. He is asking the big questions of dinosaur evolution.
“He has reinvigorated how we look at dinosaur evolution,” says David Weishampel, a dinosaur paleontologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “He helped us understand how it all fits together.”
But Sereno also stands apart because of another, intangible quality. Call it chutzpah or finesse, enthusiasm or ambition. However you define it, Sereno’s got it.
In the past few years, Sereno made both People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People issue and Newsweek’s list of people to watch in the new millennium. He has also been profiled in nearly a dozen documentaries.
This fall he ran the Chicago Marathon to raise money to reconstruct his newest dino find, bringing in $14,000.
With brochures, flashy Web sites and PR releases, Sereno and his wife Gabrielle Lyon, co-founder of a science education program, and their students know how to publicize their work.
“The biggest thing about Paul is that he never seems to get tired,” says Jeff Wilson, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. Sereno was Wilson’s mentor during his graduate school days at the University of Chicago.
Sereno gets some flak for his high-profile promotions, but colleagues in the world of paleontology say it’s not a “damnable offense.”
“If that [the publicity] was all you knew about him, you’d think he was fluff,” Weishampel says. But he says no one doubts Sereno’s scientific contributions. And many say the publicity draws people to the field and helps increase funding.
Sereno himself isn’t entirely comfortable with the publicity, but says he doesn’t mind if it helps keep his projects alive. He finances most of his expeditions through grants and fund-raising and says he’s chronically in debt.
“I’m not on a mission to be famous,” Sereno said as he headed to the library on a rainy day on campus this fall. “I’m here, and I want to do these things--life is short.”
For Sereno, getting out of the office is almost a religious imperative.
“I’ve always had a hard time getting lost in the ivory tower,” he says. “I don’t see the point of it. The satisfaction comes a lot from the people and the teamwork in the field. You live and pocket experiences that are unmatched.”
Being part of a Sereno expedition isn’t easy. For months at a time, he leads his teams into sometimes dangerous terrain. On the 1993 Niger dig, the group traveled in a convoy of six vehicles across the Sahara.
“It’s like driving from Chicago to New York and not seeing a living thing,” he says. “We passed dead cars--people who didn’t make it.”
A local conflict forced the group into a walled compound at night. Out in the field, armed guards stood by to protect them. He described it, simply, as “the challenge of a lifetime.”
Back in Chicago, on any given day, Sereno could be teaching a graduate course, writing a paper, scrounging for grant money or working with his wife on a middle school or high school dinosaur curriculum. In 1998 he and his wife started a nonprofit educational organization to make science more accessible to the public.
They often bring students to the basement of a nondescript building on campus where Sereno stores his fragile 135-million-year-old bones. They were transported to Chicago in plaster-and-burlap casts. Sereno and his students methodically extracted each bone--often using delicate dental tools--from their protective shells.
A Family Full of PhDs
In his lab, Sereno seems a man whose career was preordained. But that’s not exactly what he was expecting.
“I didn’t have very rosy prospects in school,” says Sereno, the second in a family of six children reared in Naperville, a Chicago suburb. He couldn’t read in second grade and couldn’t tell time in third. It wasn’t until the end of high school that the mediocre student began to turn things around.
“But I don’t look at that as an unexplained miracle,” Sereno says. He credits his parents--an artist and a self-taught civil engineer--for making him a scientist. In their home, there were no answers, only questions.
Though one set of grandparents never went beyond the sixth grade, all six Serenos graduated from Northern Illinois University.
They all went on for PhDs and now teach at some of the best universities in the country. Among them, there are two neuroscientists, two psychologists and one psycholinguist.
Paul, the oddball in paleontology, discovered his field on a visit to New York’s American Museum of Natural History with his older brother, who was considering paleontology among several different PhD tracks.
“I just saw all the possibilities,” Sereno says, his eyes widening. “It was clear after that museum exhibit that that was what I was going to do. The museum was an exotic place that I could go anywhere from.”
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A Dinosaur Compendium
Some of Paul Sereno’s dinosaur discoveries:
* Herrerasaurus, “Herrera’s reptile,” one of the oldest dinosaurs, was named in honor of Victorino Herrera, an Argentinian artisan who led paleontologists to the first bones of this animal in 1958. That discovery was incomplete. In 1988, paleontologist Paul Sereno found a complete skull and several partial skeletons in the foothills of the Andes. These finds allowed him to properly describe the animal and place it in its larger evolutionary context.
* Eoraptor, “Dawn raptor.” One of the most primitive dinosaurs ever found, this 228-million-year-old predator had razor-sharp teeth and long claws. Sereno’s team found it in Argentina in 1991. Because this dinosaur resembled the common dinosaur ancestors, it helped paleontologists understand where dinosaurs came from.
* Afrovenator, “African hunter.” Found in Niger in 1993, this 27-foot-long, 135-million-year-old predator is the most complete skeleton of a carnivore ever found in Africa from the Cretaceous period (144 million to 65 million years ago). This discovery affected thinking about the wanderings of dinosaurs as the supercontinent Pangaea was breaking up into the continents we know today.
* Jobaria, “Giant,” also found in Niger in 1993. Jobaria roamed Africa 135 million years ago. The 70-foot plant-eating sauropod dinosaur, a contemporary of Afrovenator, was so well suited to its habitat that its forebears had the same anatomical shape for millions of years. Many dinosaurs changed more rapidly, adapting to new environments.
* Carcharodontosaurus, “Shark-toothed reptile,” discovered in 1995 in Morocco. This 90-million-year-old dinosaur was among the largest carnivores to walk the earth. Sereno and his team unearthed the skull in the Moroccan Sahara.
* Deltadromeus, “Delta runner,” a 27-foot-long predator that lived 90 million years ago, was also found in 1995 in the Moroccan Sahara. Its discovery, along with Carcharodontosaurus and Sereno’s finds in Niger, has provided compelling evidence that Africa’s dinosaurs evolved differently from those elsewhere in the world.
* Suchomimus, “Crocodile mimic,” found in Niger in 1997. This huge, fish-eating dinosaur dates back 110 million years. It had a skull like a crocodile’s and foot-long thumb claws. This find suggested that dinosaurs were able to cross the seaway between Africa and other continents later than had been suspected.
