Move over Indiana Jones. Geologist Ken Lacovara, AS '97PhD, is UD's own version of the classic adventure-seeking explorer, braving some of the world's harshest conditions in the name of scientific research and helping discover the remains of the largest dinosaur ever found.

While working as chief geologist on an excavation in the Sahara desert, 325 kilometers southwest of Cairo, Lacovara was a member of a scientific team that unearthed the partial remains of a new genus of dinosaur, Paralititan stromeri.

Lacovara and his colleagues excavated more than 15,000 pounds of fossils and other specimens on their first dig, during January and February of 2000, including the nearly 6-foot, 400-pound humerus (upper arm bone) of the Paralitian stromeri. The discovery was marked by dust storms that lasted up to three days, poisonous camel spiders, pit vipers and death stalker scorpions capable of killing a grown man almost instantly.

This discovery never would have happened were it not for a mistake made by a graduate student. While on a preliminary survey of the area in January of 1999, Josh Smith from the University of Pennsylvania accidentally entered the wrong coordinates into his global positioning device. He came upon a piece of bone sticking out of the ground, took a picture and marked down the position. Almost a year later, scientists from Penn, Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences traveled to Egypt to unearth the specimen and study its surroundings.

Lacovara was instrumental in placing the new dinosaur in context byinterpreting the environment in which it lived. The name Paralititan, developed by Lacovara, is a description of the landscape. Ninety-five million years ago, the area known today as the Bahariya Oasis, deep in the Sahara desert, was a tropical coastline, with low-energy tidal channels similar to those in Florida's Everglades, he explains. These environments are known to coastal geologists as "paralic"; hence, the name Paralititan, meaning tidal giant. The name stromeri is in homage to Ernst Stromer, a Bavarian paleontologist who first excavated the Bahariya Oasis during the early part of the 20th century.

A year after unearthing the dinosaur's bones, Lacovara and the team went back to the oasis to study plants and other smaller, less glamorous fossils there, collecting another 15,000 pounds of specimens. The environmental analysis is critical in this type of study, Lacovara says. "If the dinosaur is not placed in ecological context, it's really just trophy hunting."

The discovery was published in Science Magazine and made the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Miami Herald, as well as major newspapers in Argentina, Britain, Japan, Russia, Spain, Italy and Germany.

Two two-hour documentaries also were filmed, funded by Cosmo Studios and its partner, MPH Entertainment. The two production companies financed all excavation expenses.

"They took a big risk on us," Lacovara says, "considering that there was no guarantee that we would find anything at the outset of the project."

Fortunately, the investment paid off. The network A&E bought the rights to both documentaries, which are among the first ever to be filmed for HDTV, or high definition television. Random House will publish a companion book to the documentaries.

Although Lacovara has been interested in geology since childhood, he majored in music at Rowan University.

"After my sophomore year, I went out to California to play the drums for a year," he says. "Ironically, the traveling that I did as a musician was what really made me decide to become a geologist. Seeing different landscapes and rock formations really fascinated me."

When he returned to school at the University of Maryland, he entered as a physical geology major. After also completing a master's degree at Maryland, Lacovara chose the University of Delaware for doctoral work. "I looked at all the schools and considered it the best place in the nation to study coastal geology," he says.

His interest in music remains, however. While staying in the village of Bawiti, near the excavation site, Lacovara would participate in impromptu jam sessions with the nomadic Bedouin musicians he befriended in the desert.

Lacovara, interim director of Drexel's department of engineering geology, says he loves his work. The only way to be truly happy is to pursue a field of study that is gratifying and gives one a sense of accomplishment, he says.

"My advice to anyone," he says, "is to make sure you love what you are doing. Getting a Ph.D. involves a lot of toil and sweat, so you must be certain that you really want it."

Over the next five years, Lacovara plans to travel back to the Bahariya Oasis at least three more times. He also traveled to Montana this past summer to help world-renowned paleontologist Peter Dodson interpret the environment of a large dinosaur (a diplodocus) being excavated there.

On a side trip in the Big Horn Canyon of Wyoming, Lacovara discovered a set of pterosaur (flying reptile) tracks in a Jurassic beach deposit. The buzz over the Bahariya project helped him obtain a collecting permit from the National Park Service. After the rare tracks are studied, Lacovara has agreed to donate them to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, where they will be displayed.

In addition, he is making plans to work on sites in South America and Asia.

Lacovara says he prefers not to dwell much on the finding in the Sahara, choosing instead to look ahead to the future. For Lacovara, the best is always yet to come.

--Tom Monaghan, AS 2003