Dinosaurs of Tendaguru

As the book is directed towards young readers in Tanzania, the authors invented a partially new narrative to set the story of the discovery, the subsequent excavations, and the scientific knowledge about natural history and the life of dinosaurs into a contemporary Tanzanian perspective.

For the first time, this book presented thorough information about the excavations and the reconstructed skeletons of the dinosaurs that are exhibited in the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany, to Tanzanian readers in their own language.

Subsequently, scientists at the museum in Berlin reconstructed several skeletons of different dinosaur species, making the fossils of the Tendaguru formation one of the world’s most important collections for ongoing research.

The text in Swahili was jointly written by the palaeontologist Charles Sanaane and the natural historian Cassian Magori of the University of Dar es Salaam, and edited for young readers by literary writer Bernard Mapalala.

In order to make this important historical information accessible to a general local audience, the Goethe-Institut in Dar es Salaam suggested the story of the Tendaguru dinosaurs to the publishers of the book in 1998.