The giants that left Tanzania

The story of Tendaguru, the richest dinosaur graveyard in Africa, and how its bones ended up in Berlin and London

If you have ever driven down to Lindi, in southern Tanzania, you have probably seen the giant dinosaur statue standing at the roundabout as you enter the town. Most people slow down, take a photo, and keep going. I used to do the same.

It turns out the statue is not random. About 60 kilometres before that roundabout, a small dirt road branches off the highway toward a place called Tendaguru. No grand entrance, no museum, no sign worth noticing. Just bush. But 150 million years ago, that stretch of land was one of the richest dinosaur ecosystems on Earth, and the statue at the roundabout is essentially a memorial to what existed there.

I went to see it earlier this month. The more I learned, the more I realised this is a story most Tanzanians have never been told, and most of the world has been told the wrong way around.

What was actually here

Tendaguru means “steep hill” in Mwera, one of the languages of southern Tanzania. During the Late Jurassic period, the hills around it were home to Giraffatitan, a long-necked plant-eater roughly 12 metres tall and 47 tonnes heavy, basically a two-storey building with a neck. There was Kentrosaurus, a smaller, sharper cousin of Stegosaurus, walking around in plates and spikes. Around a dozen distinct dinosaur species have been formally identified from the site, sitting alongside a much wider fossil record of fish, plants, and ancient reptiles. The sauropods in Jurassic Park were partly modelled on creatures from this exact place.

In the most literal sense, those were Tanzanian dinosaurs.

How the bones left

Bernhard Sattler, a German mining engineer, was prospecting around the Mbwemkuru River for a company that wanted to mine garnets and graphite, and he was not having much luck. According to the German records, a local worker eventually took pity on him and said, more or less, “Sir, this is bad, you keep searching and never find anything. Come, I will show you something you might need.” The worker led him over rough tracks to a place where huge bones were showing through the soil.

He did not know they were dinosaurs. Nobody did yet. He just knew they were unusual, and that this foreign man with his mining tools would want to see them.

Sattler informed the colonial administration. Berlin was initially sceptical, probably just giraffe or elephant bones, they thought, and to be safe, sent the paleontologist Eberhard Fraas to take a look. Fraas reported back that this is no ordinary site. The museum in Berlin then organised a fundraising campaign for what it called a “national task for the German colonial empire,” and the dig was on. Sattler, for his part, was eventually awarded the Knight’s Cross.

Between 1909 and 1913, the German Tendaguru Expedition extracted 225 tonnes of fossil material from the hills. Up to 500 local workers were involved as diggers, preparators, and porters, carrying wooden crates and bamboo drums on their shoulders and heads for four to five days in the bush, all the way to the coastal town of Lindi.

Then Germany lost the First World War. With the war, it lost the colony. With the colony, it lost Tendaguru, and the territory became Tanganyika under British administration. Between 1924 and 1931, the British Natural History Museum carried out its own expedition and shipped another 589 crates of fossils to London.

Same extraction. Different flag.

If you walk into the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin today, you will find yourself standing under the tallest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. The neck rises into the rafters. The skull almost touches the ceiling. Schoolchildren stare. Tourists photograph. Museum labels explain its scientific importance.

That skeleton is Giraffatitan. And it is from Lindi.

In London, the Natural History Museum holds the British half. Berlin got the showpiece. London got the leftovers. Tanzania, the country that produced both, was left with the holes in the ground and a few bones.

The man whose name survived

It is easy to read this as a story in which Africans appear only in the background, carrying bones for European scientists. That version is comfortable for old expedition reports, but it is not complete.

One of the most important people on the Tendaguru dig was Boheti bin Amrani, a Tanzanian from Lindi. He was hired as the Oberaufseher, the overseer of the local labour force, which already made him central to the operation. Hundreds of workers, dozens of dig sites, kilometres of bush. He ran it. But that is not what makes him remarkable. What makes him remarkable is that his curiosity took him beyond his job description. Over the years on the dig, Boheti learned the science. He learned how to read the ground, how to handle the bones, how to clean and stabilise fossils that had survived 150 million years and could still be ruined by one careless movement. By the time the expedition matured, contemporaries described him as just as knowledgeable about, and as essential to, the science of Tendaguru as the German paleontologists Werner Janensch and Edwin Hennig, the two men whose names ended up in the textbooks.

His hands worked on the very fossils that became the Berlin skeleton.

A dinosaur species was eventually named after him: Australodocus bohetii. Somewhere in the scientific literature of the world, there is a dinosaur that carries the name of a Tanzanian man from Lindi. That is not nothing. Though it is worth noting what the other names from that expedition got attached to. The Berlin skeleton was first displayed in 1937 as Brachiosaurus brancai, named after Wilhelm von Branca, the German museum director who organised the fundraising back home. Boheti got a species. Branca got the headline animal.

What is at Tendaguru now

The 1930s Great Depression eventually made digging a hassle. Across the German and British expeditions combined, more than 10,000 fossils were pulled from the hills, and UNESCO now describes Tendaguru as the richest dinosaur site in Africa.

Today, honestly, there is not much you can see with your eyes. Most of the bones are gone. A few smaller pieces are still there, scattered in the soil, but the giants have left. What remains are the excavation pits, the scars in the ground where they used to lie. As of May 2026, to get there from the highway, you need patience and around 50,000 Tanzanian shillings for a bodaboda (a motorbike taxi, for readers outside East Africa) through some genuinely rough bush tracks. My friend and I made the trip, and it was not glamorous but very memorable and recommended. The road was rough. The heat was honest about itself. But there is something quiet and heavy about standing in the very pit where Giraffatitan’s leg bones left the ground, looking around at hills that nobody is talking about.

The good news is that an information centre about Tendaguru is in its final stages of construction, just 500 metres off the Lindi highway. When it opens, the story will at least have a proper home on the soil where it actually happened.

That dinosaur statue at the entrance to Lindi is not a gimmick. It is a historical shadow of what existed there. The bones are in Berlin. The leftovers are in London. The skeleton tourists photograph in Europe came out of Tanzanian soil, was found by Tanzanians, was prepared by Tanzanian hands, and was carried to the sea by Tanzanian shoulders. We did not get to keep most of the bones. But the land is still here, the hills are still here, the smaller fragments still sleeping in the soil are still here, the name Tendaguru is still here, and the story, including the parts the European museum labels leave out, is still ours to tell.

So I am telling it.