Labels:text | font | paper | letter | document OCR: Werner Janensch (1878-1969), from the Berlin Museum in Germany, was chosen to lead the 1909 expedition to Tendaguru. He was accompanied by Edwin Hennig, from the University of Berlin, and the original finder of the site, German geologist W. B. Sattler. Eberhard Fraas was unable to go with them, as he had caught dysentery on his previous trip to Africa. The excavation team uncovered a huge quantity of scattered bones at the site, and the quiet African bush was soon disturbed by the activities of about 170 local workers and their families, who built a village there. INHOSPITABLE BUSH Domestic animals could not be used to transport provisions in the disease-ridden bush, so all supplies had to be carried from the nearest port of Lindi by porters, a trip that took four days. On their return trip, the porters carried the gigantic fossils slung on poles, each fossil carried by up to four men. By 1911, 500 men were working on the site, the largest labor force ever to work on a dinosaur excavation. In the first three years, 5,400 trips were made to Lindi, and more than 180 tonnes (200 tons) of bones were removed. BACK IN BERLIN Many of the fossils were in bad condition and lay scattered over a wide area, so little identification work could be done in the field. A huge amount of preparation had to be carried out back in Berlin. Eventually, the team was able to identify many species of dinosaurs, including Elaphrosaurus, Dicracosaurus, and Kentrosaurus. The most impressive find was an almost complete skeleton of Brachiosaurus. It was 12 m (39 ft) tall and 23 m (75 ft) long. Brachiosaurus took 26 years to assemble for display, and was finally unveiled in the Humboldt Museum, Berlin, in 1937. LATER AFRICAN DISCOVERIES The Tendaguru discoveries proved the first of many remarkable dinosaur finds from the African continent. By 2000 at least 16 nations had recorded dinosaurs. They included early forms in Morocco and South Africa, and sail-backed or hump-backed Cretaceous dinosaurs in the Sahara desert. Here, in Niger, in the 1990s, teams led by the American paleontologist Paul Sereno found spectacular skeletons of the predators Afrovenator and Suchomimus.
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