Nalut Dinosaur Museum

In reality there is no building dedicated to the dinosaur fossils found in Nalut. The remains are housed in a special wing of the local Red Crescent (Red Cross) building, and it is this wing that I am here referring to as Nalut Dinosaur Museum. The aim of this web page is therefore to collect information and develop an online gallery about the archaeological finds of Nalut. All photos shown here are original photos taken by our team and have never been published before.

Photo of professor Mas3oud Khalifah Almashaekh:
the first to discover the dinosaurs of Nalut. The framed photo is on display in the museum.

Dinosaur Fossils From Nalut

Leg-fossil remains of   a carnivores dinosaur were discovered in a site used for excavating construction sand, about one kilometre (1km) north-east of Nalut. It was estimated that the dinosaurs that lived in the area of Nalut were nearly 16 meters tall, 6 meters high, and weighed nearly 8000 kilograms. It was thought that the dinosaur swallowed soft stones to aid digestion. A petrified forest of giant trees was also discovered in an area west of Nalut. These fossilised trees, some of which are up to 20 meters tall, date to the same period from which the dinosaur fossils date - between 90 and 95 million years ago.

Crocodile And Fish Fossilised Bones

Fossilised Dinosaur Remains

In August 2005 two American scientists from the Washington University in St. Louis: Joshua Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and David Tab Rasmussen, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, joined a number of Libyan scientists and experts to study the archaeological findings in the area. This study was the first American-Libyan scientific collaboration of its kind. Before the findings of the group, there have only been about five legitimate reports of dinosaurs out of Libya since 1960. Read more here.

The team:

D. Tab   Rasmussen (American)
Joshua Smith (American)
Ahmed S3eed 3asker (Libyan)
Sifaw Tshakrin (Libyan)
Khaled Bourqiq (Libyan)
Miloud Abuqaris
Umar Solayman
Mustafa Ashibani

According to J. Smith, S. Tshakreen, S. Rasmussen, and M. Lamanna, (New dinosaur discoveries from the Early Cretaceous of Libya, 2006, JVP 26(3) Abstracts pp.126,
http://www.dinodata.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9248&Itemid=103):

"In August 2005 . . . Along Jabal Nafusah we produced fossil vertebrates from 13 localities in the Aptian-Albian (~125-99 Ma) Chicla Formation and the underlying uppermost Cabao Formation (uppermost strata regarded as upper Neocomian, ~125 Ma) . . . Dinosaurs are currently represented by fragmentary remains of a ?titanosauriform sauropod and the partial skeleton of a theropod. The theropod, the most complete record of a Libyan dinosaur to date, was found at the top of the Cabao Formation near the town of Nalut, ~40 km east of the Tunisian border. It consists of vertebrae and appendicular elements."

The Arabic sign reads: "dinosaur bone remains, not identified (or classified) yet."

Some of the related publications exhibited at the museum.

A model of a dinosaur from Nalut (Festival).