Maverick dinosaur hunter rewriting the prehistory books

Sereno

In this story: An irresistible adventure Hoisting 25 tons of bones the hard way Running the distance to raise cash Getting out of the office is imperative Using armed guards on Niger expedition RELATED STORIES, SITES

January 11, 2000
Web posted at: 5:39 p.m. EST (2239 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

CHICAGO -- Paul Sereno broke the news to his team at an oasis deep in the Sahara Desert. After years of planning, a 1,500-mile (2,400-kilometer) 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.

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Some of Paul Sereno's dinosaur discoveries
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Evolution

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. But 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.

An irresistible adventure

Members of the 1993 expedition to Niger carefully unearth the sauropod

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 left -- including some of the more experienced scientists -- Sereno went ahead.

"It was an adventure, and it was unexplored," he said. "It was irresistible."

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.

Hoisting bones into the back of a truck during the 1997 visit to Niger

His teams regularly work 12-hour days in temperatures hovering near 125 degrees (52 C), digging for bones with chisels and picks.

Hoisting 25 tons of bones the hard way

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 the 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.

Running the distance to raise cash

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.

Sereno trained for nearly six months to run the Chicago Marathon

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 public relations 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 flack 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.

Getting out of the office is imperative

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. "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."

Using armed guards on Niger expedition

A reconstruction of the 70-foot-tall Jobaria found in Niger in 1993

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, working with his wife on a middle school or high school dinosaur curriculum. Last year, he and his wife started a nonprofit educational organization to make science more accessible to the public. The Web address is www.projectexploration.org

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.

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.

"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 hold doctoral degrees, and some now teach at prestigious universities. Among them, there are two neuroscientists, two psychologists and one psycholinguist.

In high school and the first years of college, Paul aspired to be an artist and painted still-life pictures. But during his junior year, he discovered his professional passion on a visit to New York's American Museum of Natural History.

"I never recovered from that visit," he writes in his Web site, http://dinosaur.uchicago.edu. "In paleontology, I saw an irresistible combination of travel, adventure, art, biology, and geology. I knew exactly what I wanted to do."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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