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November 4, 2000
Special Update
by Paul C. Sereno & Gabrielle Lyon
At first sight, a desert
seems nothing more than an empty wasteland,
a super-heated moonscape. To our expedition
team, to the contrary, is a place that holds
discoveries, surprises and inspiration.
In a desert, you learn to expect the unexpected.
A complete
human skull, approximately 5000 years old,
is slowly exhumed by the wind and sand of
the Sahara.
Crocodiles, Cows
and Stone Tools
At the very end of Camp
2 and our prospecting in the Tenere, we
drove up to an interesting spot before returning
a final time to camp. Rudd was first to
spot bone. "Look, a croc scute!" he shouted
from the Land Rover. We got out and soon
we found more of the hard, black, pock-marked
disks. These were the fossilized armor plates
of a crocodile, but they belonged to a species
we had never seen at Gadoufaoua. There we
had found several new small crocodiles as
well as skeletons of the huge crocodile
Sarcosuchus, but none had keeled
plates like this one.
"There's something big
over here!" shouted Allison. We gathered
around her find, a blackened, fossilized
skull fragment more than a foot across.
After puzzling over the piece briefly, I
declared "It's a cow, a fossilized cow skull."
Now what was a fossil
cow skull doing in a place like this - an
area rich in dinosaur bone more than 100
million years old?
T ime-blackened
fossil remains of rhinos, goats, and crocodiles
recovered from a floodplain sit on the hood
of the Land Rover alongside stone tools
and remains of fossilized humans.
More pieces of the puzzle
were being picked up by other team members.
Dave exclaimed gleefully, "Look, it's human!
Part of the skull!" as he held high the
curved plate of bone that shields the massive
human brain. He never expected to find fossil
humans on a dinosaur expedition.
The "desert-varnish"
of a fossilized skull and skeleton of an
ancient human lie in striking contrast to
the sandy desert floor.
Clanking like ceramic,
all of these bones were fossilized. A stone
tool surfaced and we realized we were sampling
the skeletons and tools of ancient human
occupants of the Sahara and the animals
that filled their world. Soon a pile of
bone lay on the hood of one of the Land
Rovers. "Put all fossil human pieces here,
fish go there. Put non-human mammal finds
here."
"Here's a goat shin
bone," remarked Eric, who added another
domesticated animal to the bone assemblage.
Although much younger
than the dinosaur bones we had been collecting,
these fossils were still thousands of years
old, dating back to a time when the Sahara
was much wetter than today. The bones of
crocodiles, snakes, and huge freshwater
fish mutely testify to a time when the region
boasted broad rivers and deep lakes that
abounded with wildlife.
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