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Dear Class,
It is early Friday morning
and the sun has just come up. My cat Mobius
is playing around with a little toy mouse
and my husband, Paul, is going through our
closets looking for thing he wants to pack.
In just two days we leave for a four-month
expedition to look for dinosaurs in the
Sahara Desert in Africa. It's exciting,
but before I tell you about the trip, I
should give you a little background.
Where to start? My first
dinosaur expedition was in 1993, when I
was in my third year of college, but the
story the dinosaurs of Niger begins even
before that. In 1990 Paul, who is a paleontologist
and teacher at the University of Chicago,
was invited to go along on an expedition
to the Sahara with a group from the British
Museum in London. Most of their group was
interested in fish fossils and they wanted
to have someone along who knew about dinosaurs.
Scientists have been
finding fossils - including remains of dinosaurs
- in Niger for nearly a hundred years. Paul
jumped at the chance and went along with
the British team - not sure what he'd find,
but excited about the chance to visit West
Africa. In the very last days of the British
expedition, a local Touareg nomad told Paul
about a site with a lot of "large camel
bones." When Paul and the nomad arrived
at the site, Paul was so stunned by what
he say that his eyes nearly popped out of
his head!
He was looking at a
graveyard of skeletons of sauropod dinosaurs.
("Sauropod" is the name for the group of
plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks,
long tails, small heads. Diplodocus and
Apatosaurus are both sauropods.)
One of the reasons he
was so delighted as that it looked like
the skeletons were in pretty good shape:
the bone were in good condition and they
seemed to be articulated (the bones hadn't
been moved around much after the animal
died). Another thing that excited him was
that there were maybe five or six - or more
-skeletons in one small area. He knew that
this was a very special place and decided
right then that one way or another he was
going to bring an expedition team back to
the site to figure out what these animals
were and how they had died. He called the
site "Fako" (fah-kho) after a nearby rock
formation.
Well, it was more than
three years before he was able to return
to Fako. There were lots of obstacles. First,
he needed to raise money to run the expedition.
An expedition to the Sahara Desert is expensive.
You need to buy plane tickets for team members
and vehicles for the field work. You also
need to buy what ever equipment, supplies
and food you'll need during the expedition.
Then, of course, there's the cost of shipping
everything there and back.
Paul was able not only
to get a grant, but also to get an invitation
from the country of Niger to explore the
area. He collected a team of about 20 students
and scientists who were eager to get to
work making lists of supplies. Just about
that time, the political problems in the
country resulted in a civil war. For a while
it looked like Paul's dream of returning
to the site would never be a reality.
By 1993 some of the
political issues in Niger had begun to be
resolved and the people held elections.
Paul saw a window of opportunity and reassembled
a team. By this time it included myself
(carrying the official title of "Team Member
and Expedition Scribe"). We set off on one
of the most dramatic undertakings ever.
I wish I could say
that everything worked smoothly, but it
didn't. I won't go into all the details
now. But that's the thing about expeditions
- there's always something you hadn't planned
on. I guess that's part of what makes expeditions
different from vacations.
When we finally got
the proper documents to work at the site,
we didn't have enough time to do a good
job, so we worked on seeing what else we
could find. It was a good decision because
guess what? We found a new carnivore (meat
eater). We named it Afrovenator, the "African
hunter."
There's so much I want
to tell you about that first trip to Niger.
about the Touareg nomads we met; about what
it was like to drive across the desert in
big, heavy Land Rover trucks; about our
meals of dehydrated food; about falling
asleep at night on a cot under a dark blue
sky and how the stars came all the way down
to the ground. but this letter is starting
to get long so I better skip ahead a little.
Part
II: 1997, The Return to Niger
As I mentioned, in 1993
we weren't able to excavate Fako but we
didn't give up. In 1995 our team went to
explore 90-million-year-old beds in Morocco,
where we discovered the long and quick dinosaur
we named Deltadromeus, the "river runner,
and the T-Rex-sized meat eater Carcharodontosaurus,
the "shark-toothed reptile. But even when,
later our team went to Brazil and Argentina
to look for dinosaurs, we were always dreaming
of that huge site waiting for us at Fako.
Paul, his core two graduate students, Jeff
Wilson and Hans Larsson, and I (a teacher
and writer) spent a lot of time talking
about our return. Talking about wanting
to go back. We were all dreaming. Dreaming
and planning.
A successful expedition
takes a lot of work and careful thinking.
You need to make lists of the supplies you'll
need, you need to figure out the best route
to get the team and supplies to and from
where you're going; you need to negotiate
a cooperative agreement with the government
and the scientists of the country.
We did all of that -
and planned an epic undertaking: an 18-person
team; 2 ½ tons of supplies (including 100,000
pounds of plaster); four months in the desert.
This is what it would take. We didn't get
back until 1997. But when we did the wonder
of what we found when we excavated Fako
made it all worth while. Buried for 130
million years, bones of enormous plant eaters
had slowly been exposed as sun and wind
eroded the ancient rock surrounding them.
Below the rock we also
found, to our complete surprise, the near-complete
skeleton of a 60-foot long plant eater,
underneath we discovered a young one, a
juvenile. Careful study of the rocks surrounding
the bone told us that even though the skeletons
were the same species, they had been buried
in two different flooding events. Their
bodies had been caught in the crook of a
river and buried in enormous floods. Not
only was the site important because the
number of skeletons suggested that this
kind of sauropod probably traveled in herds;
the skeletons were in such good shape almost
every bone was preserved. More than 95%
of the animal was represented.
When we started to talk
about what to name the new dinosaur, we
asked the local people what they called
the giant bones in Tomacheck, their indigenous
language. "Jobar," Mohammed told us. And
he told us a story about "Jobar." "If children
are not good," he said, "parents tell them
that Jobar will come and get them." The
bones already had a name. "What about calling
the dinosaur "Jobaria?" Jeff suggested.
And so, Africa's dinosaur giant was named.
(We later heard that the word "Jobar" is
also Arabic for giant. That made the name
fit on both accounts.)
We had moved more than
15 tons (30,000 pounds) of rock by hand
to get the bones out of the ground. We chiseled
the rock away from the bone, we moved the
chunks of stone out of the pit by hand and
with wheelbarrows; we covered the bones
with plaster jackets; we made maps of the
site, we labeled everything and recorded
all the information in our log books. And
when we were done we had three weeks left.
Did we kick it? Nope.
We made a beeline for the heart of the Sahara:
to an area of desert called the "Tenere"
to a location known as "Gadafoua," one of
the richest fossil preserves in the world.
Gadafoua was amazing
- fossils of every kind of animal you can
imagine: we found not only evidence of plant
eating and meat eating dinosaurs, we found
fish, fossilized wood, two species of crocodile,
tiny snake vertebrae (back bones), the wing
of a pterosaur, and two, tiny, perfectly
preserved turtles that had died side by
side more than 100 million years ago.
One of our goals was
to survey and document what we found. Even
more important than collecting was simply
to make a map for the government of what
was there. In our first 9 days we located
more than 72 sites worth collecting. One
of these sites was found by team member
Dave Varricchio on his birthday. The 12-inch
long claw laying on the surface of the rock
was like a beacon.
When we explored the
claw site further we uncovered more than
230 bones of an enormous, fin-backed predator.
Our luck with fossils stayed with us, but
not our luck with weather. In fact, the
entire five days it took us to excavate
the animal a sandstorm raged. We covered
our heads and faces with canvas bags, strapped
on goggles or, took a lesson from the Touareg
and adopted 'sheshes." These long pieces
of fabric, when wrapped traditionally, cover
your head, ears, nose, mouth and leave just
a little room for your eyes to peek out.
It's been great protection against wind
and sand - for nearly a thousand years.
The animal we excavated
during the sandstorm had an exceptionally
elongated snout - more like a crocodile
than a meat-eating dinosaur. In addition,
at the very front of its head the teeth
curved back like hooks - a perfect fishing
machine. For these reasons we named the
animal "Suchomimus." "Sucho" means crocodile
and "mimus" means mimic. This animal was
highly adapted for eating fish - much like
the 50-foot long crocodiles it must have
encountered along the edges of the rivers
it may have prowled.
Because of all of these
experiences and the friends we've made,
our team has a long, and strong, relationship
with the people (and dinosaurs) of Niger.
Part
III: Niger, 2000
On August 13 (two days
from today!) an advance crew of 8 people
will fly from O'Hare airport to Paris and
then Niamey, the capital of Niger. Already
this past summer Paul and one of the team,
Eric, spent three weeks in Niger getting
our vehicles up and running and developing
a cooperative agreement with the government.
In early July we shipped
three cargo containers from Chicago across
the country by truck to Newark, New Jersey.
Then the containers were put on a boat that
sailed across the Atlantic ocean to the
coast of Africa and then south to Benin.
In Benin the containers will be unloaded
and hitched to the back of trucks, which
will drive them to Niamey.
I bet you're wondering
what's in them - you can probably guess
some of the things: EVERYTHING! Our 600
lb.. of pasta, 40 lbs. of jolly ranchers,
toilet paper, plaster, wood, camping equipment,
water containers, tools. Everything from
paper clips to sleeping bags to solar lanterns
to a stove and dishwashing basins. I bet
you didn't guess, though that we would be
shipping dinosaur bones BACK to Niger! Yep.
Almost all of the bones of Afrovenator and
most of Suchomimus were loaded into specially
built containers and shipped back to Niger.
Part of the story of this expedition is
the homecoming of the fossils to their country
of origin. We're also sending a life-sized
skeleton of Jobaria for the museum.
Once the team gets to
Niamey and we meet up with our supplies
we'll head north nearly 800 miles to Agadez,
the second largest city in Niger and the
historic kingdom of the Touareg people.
The drive and seeing new people, places,
plants and animals is half the fun of the
whole trip.
You're probably curious
what happens when we actually get to the
field site. What do we do? What is the environment
like? Where do we sleep? How do we know
where to look for fossils? What do we do
when we find a dinosaur? I can't answer
all of these right now, but I do have to
give you some idea of what it's like out
in the field. (You can also check Site Search
to get answers).
When we decide a camp
area (usually a place that is some how protected
from the wind, or especially level) we then
decide where we are going to put up our
extra heavy-duty tents and which way the
openings will face.
These big tents are
for the kitchen and library and to store
supplies. People set up personal tents.
Some people sleep in their tent at night
and others, like me, prefer to sleep outside
on cots right under the stars. During the
day the temperature hits 110 or 120 degrees
Fahrenheit, but at night it drops to around
75 or 80 degrees. (Very comfortable sleeping
weather.)
Our day will begin at
sunrise. We'll eat granola with powdered
milk. Some people will drink instant coffee;
others will drink hot chocolate or tea.
(Keep in mind that almost everything we
eat in the field we have to ship from Chicago
and it all has to fit - with our other supplies
- in the backs of five Land Rovers.)
Lunch is made up of
bread (when we can get it from nearby towns),
peanut butter, sardines, and leftovers from
dinner the night before. We have lots of
fruit bars, dried fruit, pretzels. We can
even make popcorn in the field as long as
we have some oil. We eat pretty well. We
have pasta or rice for dinner and make a
sauce out of powdered soup mix, dehydrated
meat, vegetables, and spices to give it
all flavor.
For desert we have freeze-dried
ice cream sandwiches. We rarely get anything
fresh. Although the market at Agadez has
oranges, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes,
the occasional eggplant and melons, but
without refrigeration nothing keeps more
than a few days. When we do have fruit or
vegetables we eat them up fast!
I know you're wondering
about another thing: where do we go to the
bathroom? It's simple. We take a shovel,
a roll of toilet paper. Walk away from camp.
Find a quiet spot and dig a hole. When we're
done we bury it.
Most of the trash from
camp we burn or recycle. We save all our
wrappers and containers to pack fossils
in. There is very little trash where we
go in the desert, but in town there's a
lot of trash ! It's a problem.
OK. One last thing about
living in the field, and probably most important:
WATER. We can never be more than a day's
drive from water in case something happens.
We use water for drinking, cooking, washing,
and to mix the plaster that will protect
the excavated dinosaur bones. The closest
good drinking water will be in Agadez, but
sometimes we will draw water from wells
in desert oases. We will also store water
in different places near our camps in enormous
expandable water containers that we will
bury in the ground as we move from camp
to camp. Before we can drink the water we
have to purify it against certain bacteria.
We try to conserve water as much as we can.
We won't take showers every day (there's
no running water anyway.). Mostly we fill
a basin, go someplace private (like behind
a truck or a hanging tarp) and sponge off.
We're not the cleanest
of people during the field season. Before
I finish this letter and let you get back
to class, I should tell you a little something
about the fieldwork we'll be doing.
Part
IV: Digging Dinosaurs
Our plan this year is
to work four areas, each representing a
different time period during the last period
of dinosaur life on earth. We will work
mostly in the area around Agadez - crossing
through beds that are as old as 130 million
years to as young as 90 million years.
How do we know where
to look?
Reading and research.
It all starts with a question: what age
dinosaurs are we looking for? Then we find
rock that age. In our case we're looking
for dinosaurs from the mid-Cretaceous period
(about 130 - 90 million years ago). Next
we find a geology map of Africa. Most of
the world has been mapped by geologists
who were interested in finding mineral resources.
Geology maps tell you
the age and kind of rock in an area. Once
we have found an area with the right age
rock, we need to make sure it is terrestrial
and not marine rock.
Terrestrial rock is
rock formed on land; marine rock was formed
in the ocean. Since dinosaurs lived on land,
we want to make sure that we are looking
for terrestrial rock.. But there is another
tool we can use. We can read reports by
other paleontologists and geologists and
learn from them based on what they've found
in an area. After we've found an area with
the right age rock, we turn to a geographic
map (the kind you're probably familiar with)
and see if the area we want to work is covered
by a city, a lake, or roads.
Paleontologists want
to look for fossils in remote areas that
are dry. Ideally deserts are the best. Dryness
helps preserve the fossils. Luckily we already
know based on research and our own experience
that the area we're going to is the right
age, is dry and contains fossils. Some of
the time we'll be working on a dig site
(I CAN'T GIVE IT ALL AWAY!) and other times
we'll prospect - walk around and look for
fossils.
For me personally, this
is how I prospect: I walk around and keep
my eyes pretty much on the ground the whole
time until something catches my attention;
maybe a color that's different from the
rocks on the ground, or a regular shape
like a cylinder. Once I notice something
interesting I need to take a closer look.
Sometimes it is hard
to tell a piece of bone apart from a rock.
If you find a fragment of bone, you look
around for others and if you find some you
try to follow them to their source. If you're
able to do that, then you need to figure
out if the bone is actually worth collecting.
Sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes it's been
on the surface for so long that wind and
sun and rain and time have destroyed it.
On the other hand, if most of the bone is
still buried under the ground, you have
a chance it will be in good condition. You
may have found a leg, or a back bone or
a skull.
If you're really lucky
your hard work searching pays off and the
bone will lead you to other bones still
buried in the ground.
By the way, we're not
just after dinosaurs - we want to understand
what it was like when they were alive, and
so we are also interested in the other kinds
of plants and animals they coexisted with.
If we do find a dinosaur,
(and I am NOT saying ANYTHING YET ABOUT
THE DINOSAUR WITH 600 TEETH THAT WE FOUND
PART OF IN 1997 AND ARE GOING TO UNCOVER
ON THIS EXPEDITION), we can use it to try
to piece together a much bigger puzzle:
the puzzle of dinosaur evolution and the
break up of the continents. That story you'll
have to find out on your own because I really
have to go and start packing my bags now.
I'm glad to have had this chance to tell
you a little bit about our expedition.
We've got a big job
ahead of us, so wish us luck and have a
great beginning of the school year. I can't
wait to hear about it!
Sincerely,
Gabrielle
Lyon
Team Member, 2000 Expedition to Niger.
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