November 5, 2000
Permian Interlude

Agadez
11:05pm

Dinosaur-age sandstone buttes tower over the Permian-age plain,
where the team looks for fossils that predate the dinosaur era.

PERMIAN INTERLUDE

Dave: "I don't want you to get too excited, but I think I found a pretty complete skull!"

Chris: "Really? A skull? What is it?"

Dave: "Beats the heck out of me."

Chris and Hans, with the rest of the team in tow, follow Dave back to the discovery site. On bent knees we pour over the white outline of a triangular skull embedded in the grey and red marly conglomerate.

Not part of a dinosaur, the skull belongs to an enorrmous predatory amphibian that prowled the landscape - and went extinct - before dinosaurs had evolved.

Dave's discoveries - two skulls within a stone's throw of each other - were the pieces d'resistance of our four-day interlude back in time to the Permian.

Road to Arlit

To reach the Permian, you take the paved road from Agadez north to Arlit. As you pass out of Agadez north on the road to Arlit, you are met with grey gravel plains and hills. Squat, white, thorn-tipped acacias and yellow tufts of grass intersperse the rubble and hearken of greener days. Here and there tired mounds of sandstone protrude onto the surface, their layers soft and worn from the constant buffering of winds. You have moved out of the sahel and back into the Sahara. You have also moved back in time.

Occasionally camels wallow in the dust along the paved road until the beeping of a car horn sends them galumphing on their way. Even more frequently, scatters of camel and donkey bones, stripped gleaming white and clean by the sand, tell of animals that either didn't make it out of the way of oncoming cars, or didn't make it to the well in time.

Tall metal scaffolds stringing electrical wires are startlingly out of place along this road, which otherwise is devoid of billboards, advertisements, or signs of "citified" infrastructure.

Arcing north is a ribbon of earth that dates back 250 million years - more than 30 million years before the earliest dinosaurs had evolved.

We bring good drinking water from Agadez with us to every camp.
Sometimes in big balloons, sometimes in our water tank. At 8.6 pounds per gallon, the 300 gallon water tank acts like an anchor in soft sand when it is full. We inched across this sand pass with the help of sand ladders.

Our pursuit takes us not just to the Permian, but also into the land of uranium. Uranium was Niger's key export during the height of Cold War. When the price of uranium plummeted during the 1980s, Niger was thrown into a deep economic depression. Two mines are still in operation and their steel and fluorescent light structures, fenced with barbed wire, seem more appropriate in America's Midwest rust belt than on the edge of the Sahara. Occasionally bright yellow bead-sized nodules can be seen in small mounds along the side of the road - sulfurous waste from the excavation process.

As we leave the paved road and skirt dunes to make our way to the red-sandstone Permian outcrop, we joke about the level of radioactivity that might reside in the fossils we might discover.

Why go to the Permian?

The field day begins at dawn, as Paul goes over
the day's plan with the team.

The interlude of four days north of Agadez gave us a chance to assist Chris Sidor, who is interested in vertebrates of the Permian. These include the famous "pelycosaurs," the sail-backed reptiles often misconstrued as dinosaurs, and other groups of reptiles and amphibians.

The Permian world- remarkable for its mammal-like reptiles and enormous predatory amphibians - would have looked very different than the later dinosaur era. There were no dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs, turtles or corocodiles. Instead, a host of different reptiles abounded, like the captorhinomorphs that look sort of like a cross between a lizard and a crocodile.

The Permian is the age that directly precedes the Triassic, the first chapter in dinosaur evolution. One of the greatest extinction episodes ever to affect the planet occurred at the end of the Permian and gave dinosaurs and other plants and animals a chance to flourish.

The "KT" (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction that occurred 65 million years ago is famed for the demise of the dinosaurs and 60%-70% of then living species. The Permo-Triassic extinction, however, was more devastating: it took out 95% of all diversity on the planet. It is also less well understood. Hypotheses for what caused this blight include asteroids, ocean warmings, release of oxygen - and carbon dioxide. But compared to the asteroid crater in the Yucatan Peninsula identified as "the big one" at the heart of the dinosaur extinction, there is little evidence for the cause of the Permo-Triassic extinction.

There are also only a few places on the planet that preserve Permian-age rock; Russia, South Africa, Morocco are a few of them. Niger is another.

On the hood of a Land Rover, the first Permian finds of the day
are identified and wrapped for transport.

For Chris Sidor, a visit Niger's Permian could make the difference. Would the beds be fossiliferous? If so, even just one productive day could give him much needed-leverage for grants and a return expedition.

An interlude of four days would give us a chance to assist Chris, and put us within a day's drive of unexplored Cretaceous outcrop as well.

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