You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Maddie Saphaya here, grab your hiking boots and a notepad because today we're going on

a paleontology trip to Northern Africa to Morocco.

This is where Neezar Ibrahim's journey starts back in 2008 after a man sold him a box

of dinosaur fossils that would change his life.

You know, when I looked at the fossils, they were in a cardboard box.

I just thought that these fossils could be interesting.

It was just a hunch, just like something like, you know, gut feeling.

But I could tell that the bones that were in the cardboard box looked like they came

from one in the same place and they probably belonged to one animal.

So Neezar left Morocco and didn't really think about the bones again until just a year

later, while he was at a museum in Italy.

Some fellow paleontologists invited him to look at some bones in a basement.

Normal paleontology stuff.

I looked at the bones there and you know, there were quite a lot of bones.

There were leg bones and big spines and some skull bones.

And my Italian colleagues and myself suspected that these bones belonged to Spinosaurus,

which was really exciting.

And then I noticed that these bones looked really, really similar in terms of, you know,

the color, the texture, the shape to the ones I had seen in this cardboard box in Morocco.

And that's when I realized that what I had seen in Morocco were the very first bones of

this skeleton.

...