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He just dug up 15-meter dinosaurs in Niger. Vincent Reneleau is a volunteer paleontologist for the National Museum of Natural History. For Brut., he talks about his latest discoveries.
“Since 2017, I have been a volunteer paleontologist at the CR2P, the Paleontology Research Center of Paris. I don’t get paid for paleontology. That, I really do on a voluntary basis.“Vincent Reneleau has just returned from a month-long paleontological expedition to Niger. He dug up dinosaur skeletons about 15 meters tall. “It is an animal that must have weighed between 25 and 30 tons in its lifetime, approximately, so it is the weight of 6 or 7 African elephants. It took 15 days of work to get it out of the ground properly”, he explains.
“How does it go, the discovery of a dinosaur? It’s a bit like mushrooms. It’s either it shows on the surface, or you have to dig to get it. There, we saw bones coming out on the surface, so it could be a femur, it could be a piece of vertebra, it could be anything. We recognize that it is a bone quite easily when we have the eye. And the goal of the game is to see, suddenly, if it’s an isolated bone or if we really have a complete skeleton around it”, details the paleontologist.
“The project is to create one or even two major museums in Niger, one which would be in Niamey, the capital, and the other in Agadez, so that Niger can exhibit this world heritage which is truly world class. They really have one of the paleontological heritages, in any case for the dinosaurs, which is one of the most impressive in the world”, adds Vincent Reneleau.