Sallam led the discovery and description of Mansourasaurus shahinae, a species of sauropod dinosaur from Egypt, which has improved understanding of the prehistory of Africa during the latest Cretaceous period.

[4] In December 2013, Sallam and several graduate students found the partial skeleton of a dinosaur at the Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt.

[7] Sallam led a team of Egyptian and American paleontologists in describing the specimen, which was announced as belonging to a new species of sauropod, Mansourasaurus shahinae, in January 2018.

[8] Mansourasaurus is closely related to European species, providing evidence that Africa was not entirely geographically isolated during the Late Cretaceous.

[3] One of Sallam's students, Sanaa El-Sayed, is the first woman from the Middle East to have been the lead author on an internationally-published vertebrate paleontology research paper.