Through its illustrations and a partially
fictional story, the book tells the story of dinosaurs that lived approximately 150 million years ago in
East Africa. Their
skeletons were excavated between 1906 and 1913 in the former
colony of
German East Africa and until today represent the most important
excavations of dinosaur
fossils found in Africa. As the booklet 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. During several years, and under supervision of German natural scientists, 230 tons of excavation material containing fossil bones and other remnants of life 150 million years ago were packed into wooden boxes by African workers and carried to the nearby port of
Lindi. From the excavation site at the
Tendaguru Formation, they were shipped to
Hamburg and, finally, to
Berlin. 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 exhibition’s highlight is an almost 14-metre-high skeleton of the species
Giraffatitan, the largest dinosaur skeleton on display in the world. Along with presenting scientific knowledge about the existence and
environment of the dinosaurs, the presumed reasons for their
extinction, and their
classification into different species, the story of their discovery is here presented in a different way than in the historical German sources. Whereas the German excavation reports claim that the fossils were first found by a German mining engineer who was surveying the region of Tendaguru, the Tanzanian book attributes this discovery to a local farmer, a wise old man called
Mzee Buheti, who by means of magical herbs supplied by his wife Mama Msomoe, is able to travel through time and space guided by a spirit. On one of his travels back millions of years, he comes across huge animals in the region of the Tendaguru hills. Upon his return through the
millennia, he witnesses environmental changes that eventually lead to the
extinction of the dinosaurs. By means of a time line reaching from the beginning of our
universe to the present and showing pictures of different species, the reader is presented with short scientific information about the
evolution of the dinosaurs and other species. By choosing the name of Buheti for their protagonist the authors referred to the historical Boheti bin Amrani who was the local "chief supervisor"
(Oberaufseher) of more than 100 African workers involved in the excavations When in 1906, the German engineer Bernhard Sattler is surveying the region, it is Mzee Buheti who shows him the place where the fossils were found, thus prompting the excavations and their scientific exploration. In order to present an adequate visual idea of the dinosaurs and their environment, Thomas Thiemeyer, a German illustrator specializing in this subject, created colour plates for both the presumed living conditions and the
extinction of dinosaurs, and for the fictitious story of their discovery, told from a contemporary Tanzanian perspective. 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. == Aims of the book ==