Nizar Ibrahim at a research site in the desert
University magazines and newspapers have already nicknamed him “the dinosaur hunter”.
Nizar Ibrahim (27), a postgraduate student at University College Dublin, has made several major discoveries in the Sahara desert, and one of his latest has made the headlines around the world.
It’s a new type of giant flying reptile. The pterosaur lived around 95 million years ago, and Nizar led the team of scientists who made the discovery in southeastern Morocco, near the border with Algeria.
This week the group of scientists from UCD, the University of Portsmouth and University Hassan II in Casablanca published their findings in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.
“When this pterosaur was alive, the Sahara desert was a river bed basin lush with tropical plant and animal life,” Nizar explains.
“This meant there were lots of opportunities for different pterosaurs to co-exist, and perhaps feeding on quite different kinds of prey.”
Nizar also had the honour of naming the flying reptile. It will be known as Alanqa saharica, from the Arabic word “Al Anqa” meaning phoenix, the mythological flying creature that dies in a fire and is reborn from its ashes.
A childhood fascination
“Before you go, you dream of finding something special,” Nizar says. He became fascinated by dinosaurs while growing up in Berlin, then he studied geology and biology at the University of Bristol “because it was a good spot for palaeontology”.
While still an undergraduate, he developed his research plan to go to unexplored areas of the Sahara desert in search of new frontiers of palaeontology – “I love the detective work, the travelling,” he says. Then UCD provided funding for his research.
Other discoveries
“This pterosaur is distinguished from all others by its lance-shaped lower jaw which had no teeth and looked rather like the beak of a gigantic heron.
“During the excavation, we also discovered a partial neck vertebra that probably belonged to the same animal, inferring a wingspan of about six metres.”
Nizar and his team also discovered rare dinosaur footprints, hundreds of dinosaur teeth, bits of giant crocodiles and some new species of fish.
Learn more
Read an interview with Nizar Ibrahim, in which explains how he became interested in paleontology
Find out how scientists at UCD may have worked out how pterosaurs were able to fly
