PAUL SERENO
One fossil discovery after another gave University of Chicago professor Paul Sereno
a reputation for having extraordinary luck. Sereno's "luck" was due in part to his
willingness to go wherever the bones might be, however difficult and remote the site. His
discoveries helped him piece together the family tree of dinosaurs. Sereno's discoveries
began during graduate school. In 1984, as the first American graduate student of
paleontology to study in China, he identified two new dinosaur species among the bones
in Chinese fossil archives. When Chinese authorities rejected his application to dig in the
Gobi desert of Mongolia, he took his request to a local official in Mongolia. Sereno
explained in French that he wanted to hunt for the bones of big animals. The confused
official admitted him under the provisions for big game hunters but offered little hope of
finding much game in the desert. Sereno used his findings in China and Mongolia to
make a family tree of the omithischian, or bird-hipped, dinosaurs, one of the two main
orders of dinosaurs. He based his work on careful comparison of details of various
skeletons. The discovery that made Sereno famous came in 1988, the year after he
completed his doctorate and joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. In a dry,
dusty Argentina valley, among sediments 225 million years old, he found the skull and a
nearly complete skeleton of a Herrerasaurus, which, at the time, was the oldest dinosaur
ever discovered. Three years later and less than a mile away, Sereno found the complete
skeleton of a 228-million-year-old dinosaur, which he named Eoraptor. Only six feet long,
with sharp teeth and long claws, this earliest known dinosaur looked like a miniature
version of Tyrannosaurus Rex. It confirmed that dinosaurs began as small, meat-eating
animals that walked and ran on their hind legs. Sereno was the first person to conduct
extensive searches for dinosaur fossils in Africa. Governmental red tape and conditions
in the Sahara desert made his expeditions to Niger in 1993 and Morocco in 1995 two of
his most gruelling but also most rewarding.
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