The north of Niger, the Department of Agadez, rests in the cusp of the Sahara. Occupying an area larger than France, it is a region perhaps unlike any other in Africa. Preserved here, betwixt and between sculpted sand dunes, stony plains and the scrub of the red sahel, are centuries-old mud buildings (including the ever-dilapidated 1851 residence of Henri Barth and the Touareg Sultan's palace with its contradictory medieval arches and dusty television sets); two thousand years of Touareg camel caravans; 5 millennia of human history archived as windswept potchurds, rock carvings, tombs and arrowheads; and three chapters in the history of dinosaur evolution dating back 135 million years.

Currently there is no museum in Agadez, the fourth largest city in Niger and the gateway to the Sahara. There is no place to display the awesome ancient dinosaur and reptilian creatures - or the more recent ancient human past. There is no place for the region to display its patrimony, for local children to learn about their heritage, there is no destination for tourists to visit (or spend their money).

The question of how the Agadez region can benefit economically from the objects found here is a serious question. It is one posed to the expedition team - and to expedition leader Paul Sereno - often. It is one posed not only by the people of the city of Agadez, but also most especially within the small towns and villages on the periphery of paved roads - InGall, Marandet.

Marendet*

People have been living in Marendet for more than 100 years, but Marendet became a town in 1969. When you enter town from the west via a piste off the gudron (paved road), you come upon the thatched hut and adjacent mud brick house of the chief of the village.

The chief's wife Fatima, with a child on her hips and her ever-present older daughter Fatimata at her side, will most certainly greet you if the chief is in Agadez. Fatima has a long face and her scarf, wrapped around her head gives her a squared-off top, she is a jovial, intense character - curious and ready to dismiss friends and onlookers if she wants to carry on a conversation with you in private. Fatimata is nearly 14, nearly marrying age, and the dark brown leather gris-gris tied in her fine brown braided hair and the three tiny nicks on the side of each of her eyes are becoming.

If you take the piste from Agadez and enter Marendet from the north, you reach the four-roomed, long schoolhouse with its stuccoed mud walls, falling-in ceiling and brick-red metal shutters across the windows and doors. Next to the school in another long building, lives the Touareg school director, Houcha, his two wives, both targuis (Touaregs) and their eight children.

The school is just a year younger than the town, and for the past 13 years Houcha has been the director. There are 50 students in school now, divided amongst three teachers. Children in the Marendet area - which includes Tawachi, Towandabor, Tekiburt, Tats and Enad - begin attending school at age 7. After six years students take exams in Agadez and graduate. To date no person from Marendet has attended University, but if our local guides and self-proclaimed dinosaur specialists Balla and Baja are any indicators, the school grounds its students reasonably well in French, math and science.

The town is primarily made up of mud houses and thatched straw huts. Across the sand, on the other side of the kori (dried river bed) are less permanent structures - the "knotted" tents of Touaregs who may be nomadic.

When a drought began in 1987 the population of the Marendet area, which had reached a peak of 3,000, dropped by 25% . Originally inhabited by both Touaregs and Hausa people, now only Touaregs live here. Marendet also used to have a garden with tomatoes, onions, melons. Years of drought and no camels to pull the water up to irrigate brought it to a dry close. But after this year - with a lot of water and the camels in fine form - they are discussing setting up a new one.

What the people of Marendet mostly want is a well. There is water in Marendet, but it is close to the surface. During the rainy season, areas with water are rife with marlaria-carrying mosquitoes and when it rains, there is no way to hold the water and it runs off into the koris and onto the flat plain. A well would let them have not only a cleaner water source, but water year round.

About 150 people live in the town and the immediately surrounding area. These people have put their trust in Balla and Baja to learn about dinosaurs, to guide tourists at specific sites, and to protect the fossil patrimony under their care.

When I ask Balla, a lanky, tall, soft-spoken man, why he looks for dinosaur fossils, he tells me, "Because it is my work."

Looking for fossils has been these two men's "work" since 1997 when they first showed the team fossils - and the team began to demystify the enormous bones in the desert.

The Legend of Jobar

If you ask nomads what they think the giant fossil bones are that permeate the cliff of Tiguidi, sometimes they say "giant camels." Sometimes they say "ancient animals." And sometimes they say the giant bones they come across in the desert belong to "Jobar." Jobar is a huge beast. Children are warned to "be good or Jobar will come and get you." Jobar might have flown; it might be an animal that lived before a giant flood killed them all.

When, in 1997, J.P. Cavigelli (a.k.a. Gachembaki - "beard' in Tamacheck) met Balla at a well and asked him if he knew where any "big bones of an animal that you don't know what it is," Balla knew many places with bones. He had come upon them in his daily life as a shepherd and had always wondered what they were. Baja also met us in 1997. He, too, knew of bones in the area.

When it came time to name the 70-foot-long plant eater, the most common dinosaur of the region, we simply borrowed one of the indigenous namesit already carried. The animal was announced to the scientific world in 1998 as "Jobaria tiguidensis," Africa's dinosaur giant from Tiguidi.

Over the last two years Balla and Baja - and other Touaregs throughout the region - have looked for, and marked fossil sites, anticipating our return - and anticipating that these fossils may attract tourists to their tiny towns and income and resources for the people who live here.

A word about the "Dinosaurs of Marandet and InGall"

The people in these areas are committed to preserving their patrimony. The fossils here not only provide a unique look at the history of dinosaur evolution on Africa , they are - like dinosaur fossils throughout the world - unrenewable.

A school child in the small town of Belvidere, Illinois, mailed the 2000 Niger Expedition team a letter in which he wondered if Niger had any laws about dinosaur fossils. We responded, "Indeed, a law about which government body regulates fossils and how fossils should be regulated was passed in 1997, just after our field season. Niger has one of the best fossil laws on the books - in fact, better than our own. In the USA, if you find a Tyrannosaurus skull in your back yard, you can sell it for money, or just break it into a million pieces with a hammer. It's your choice. In Niger, all fossils belong to the people of the country, and all work on fossils must be approved by an agency in charge of regulating research. That way, no fossils are sold, no fossils disappear, and no fossils are broken by people that don't have any experience working with them."

Attached here, in French and English, is the body of a preliminary booklet prepared in October 2000 for the people of the Marandet and InGall regions by the team of the 2000 Expedition to Niger.

We hope that with assistance we can work with the people of Niger to protect, preserve and display their remarkable window on to the dinosaur world.

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(* A short description of InGall is included in
the 9/26 Update, "Cure Salée")