Nizar Ibrahim was born on 8 September 1982 in West Berlin, West Germany, to a German mother and Moroccan father -- his grandfather was Abdallah Ibrahim, the third Prime Minister of Morocco. He decided at age five, while reading a dinosaur book, that he would become a paleontologist. He earned a BSc in geology and biology from the University of Bristol in 2006 and a PhD from University College Dublin in 2011, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago.[1]
Ibrahim has led repeated expeditions into the Sahara of Morocco's Kem Kem Group, recovering the fossils that let him and his team redescribe Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Their 2014 and 2020 papers in Science and Nature argued the giant theropod had a paddle-like tail and other adaptations for swimming and hunting in rivers -- a proposal that reshaped how paleontologists think about predatory dinosaur ecology. He is now a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth and continues to work with researchers and students at Hassan II University in Casablanca.[1][2]
In 2015 Ibrahim became the first paleontologist named a TED Fellow, and in 2014 he was selected for National Geographic's Emerging Explorer program. His Spinosaurus work was named one of National Geographic's top 20 scientific discoveries of the 2010s.[2]