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Carcharodontosaurus is Africa's answer
to Tyrannosaurus. One of the largest
carnivores that ever walked on earth,
Carcharodontosaurus, had 6-inch-long
serrated teeth. Sereno and his team unearthed the
Carcharodontosaurus skull in the Moroccan
Sahara in 1995, solving a mystery borne from
the destruction of World War II.
At the beginning of this century, fragmentary
bones and some serrated teeth were discovered in
Egypt and described in scientific literature.
Collected by Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach in
central Egypt, these bones and teeth were housed
in Munich's Bavarian State Collections of
Paleontology and Historical Geology. On the night
of April 24, 1944, a Royal Air Force bombing run
destroyed the dinosaur fossils, leaving modern
paleontologists to wonder what kind of dinosaurs
those fossils had come from. Sereno solved the
mystery when he matched the teeth in the
Carcharodontosaurus skull with the
literature descriptions of the Egyptian fossils
destroyed in Munich over a half-century ago.
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