Brazil goes in search of own Jurassic Park

December 18, 2000
Web posted at: 3:04 PM EST (2004 GMT)

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) -- With thick glasses and a slight paunch, professor Sergio Alex Azevedo hardly looks like the man to play the hero in Brazil's biggest dinosaur hunt ever.

But the 44-year-old paleontologist will be the star of Brazil's real-life Jurassic Park when the expedition is launched next year. Only rather than chasing box office receipts, he will stalk a bevy of newfound prehistoric species.

"This will be a big scientific adventure, so I guess it's natural that people make the association ... and references to Jurassic Park help boost our profile," Azevedo said in his modest office in the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

Starting in January, he will lead a team of 20 scientists plus a documentary film crew on a 6,000-mile (9,700-km) odyssey in search of fossils, gigantic footsteps and other signs of prehistoric life in Brazil.

By the end of the year, he hopes to identify at least two and up to five new species, including a kind of Spinosaurus that may prove to be the world's biggest flesh-eating dinosaur.

But perhaps even more important, Azevedo and his expedition, "In Search of Dinosaurs," hope to spark a dinosaur frenzy in Latin America's biggest country that could fuel research and funding in the future.

"Of course we have high expectations for new finds, but we also want to call attention to the field," he said. "Dinosaur research in Brazil has always been skimpy, but we're awakening a new interest and we want to keep it alive."

In fact, Azevedo and his partners have themselves been surprised by Brazilians' Jurassic fascination.

When the National Museum team put together an exhibit last year to show off the dinosaur species discovered so far in Brazil, they hoped to attract a record 10,000 visitors to justify the overtime put into the presentation.

"We were amazed to find out that 10,000 people went to the exhibit in the first weekend alone," Azevedo said. "In the end, more Brazilians visited our dinosaur exhibit than visited a huge exhibit on Picasso at around the same time."

As a result, Azevedo and fellow scientists embarked on their first adventure: a search for funding and support to beef up Brazil's far-from-Jurassic permanent collection. Working with only 20 paleontologists, compared to about 500 in the United States, Brazil has made just eight dinosaur discoveries -- and four of them were in the last two years.

The National Museum, run in conjunction with Rio de Janeiro's Federal University, signed up Fogo-Fatua, an expedition company, and CIMA, a documentary film and production firm. Together, the three are wooing corporate sponsors.

"We already have 50 percent of the funds needed for the expedition and we should have the rest by the end of next year," said Marcos Didonet, director of CIMA. Companies such as sport utility carmaker Land Rover are supplying equipment, while others such as engineering firm Odebrecht are coughing up cash.

The team will officially launch the expedition in January, though the brunt of the journey will start only in June when they will travel thousands of miles (kilometers) by jeep from Rio to Brazil's barren northeast and through parts of the steamy jungle in the north.

"This is all about dinosaurs and the goal is discovery, but we also want to meet Brazilians' need to know about their own country," Didonet said.

The digging and investigation will focus on three main areas, the first in the impoverished northeastern state of Paraiba, where researchers have found huge numbers of dinosaur tracks and hope to uncover new ones. Prehistoric discoveries so far in the bleak landscape near the town of Sousa thrilled locals and inspired them to name their soccer team "Dinosaurs."

The expedition will also return to a site in neighboring Ceara state where scientists announced the discovery of a new dinosaur species this year: the Santanaraptor, one of the oldest dinosaurs in the world and predecessor to its more famous cousin, the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

About the size of a large dog, it looked like a lizard and walked on its hind legs about 110 million years ago -- at a time when South America was splitting away from Africa.

The team is hopeful of uncovering more material at the remote site in the interior of Ceara, which not only yielded fossils but also rare pieces of tissue and muscle fiber. "It was like it was buried yesterday," Azevedo said.

The adventurers are also betting on a site in Maranhao, the state that divides Brazil's parched northeast from the steamy jungle, to provide new clues to the country's prehistoric past.

Cajual Island off the coast is home to hundreds of dinosaur fossils that actually protrude from the ground, unlike most sites in Brazil where fossils are hidden beneath dense vegetation and thick layers of earth.

Azevedo already found teeth last year that he thinks belong to a so-far unnamed species of Spinosaurus -- a hypothesis he hopes to confirm with the mega-expedition. He has had a head reconstructed from the teeth and other fossils he found and believes the creature will prove to be as big or bigger than Argentina's Gigantosaurus, the largest carnivore on record.

But the team will have their work cut out. The island, which is home to descendants of a runaway slave community, has no roads and the fossils are visible only during low tide.

"It has become obvious that the dinosaurs won't be the only protagonists in this expedition," said CIMA's Didonet. "The lives of the scientists and local communities will be just as important."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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