"Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains."
"North Africa was another new frontier, one comfortably close to Europe and with enough influence from Britain, France, and other nations that many Europeans lived and worked there. The 1898-1900 French expeditions in Algeria - notable as much for their large contingents of soldiers aiming to subdue indigenous peoples as for their scientific zeal - had uncovered fossil teeth similar to those described by [Gideon] Mantell and [Richard] Owen from Britain, but considered them to be from fish."
During the early 1900s intense interest in dinosaurs arose across Western nations, propelled by discoveries of large, spectacular specimens in Europe and North America. Museums and financiers treated dinosaur skeletons as status symbols, prompting colonial powers to search their territories for fossils. German teams excavated large deposits in Tanzania in 1906; Russian expeditions sought fossils along the Amur River in 1916; British geologists investigated sauropod reports in India in 1917. North Africa became a proximate frontier where French expeditions recovered fossil teeth later associated with spinosaurs but initially interpreted as fish. Ernst Stromer visited Egypt in 1910–1911 and collected numerous fossils, including from the Bahariya region.
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