3.3 Million-Year-Old Fossil Reveals the Antiquity of the Human Spine
For more than 3 million years, Selam lay silent and still. Eager to tell her story, the almost perfect fossil skeleton of a 2 1/2 year-old toddler was discovered at Dikika, Ethiopia -- and she had a lot to say.
Grantee Spotlight: Thierry Smith
Thierry Smith is a research team leader at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium. He was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant during our fall 2016 cycle for his project entitled “Diversity and relationships of earliest Euprimates from Tadkeshwar Mine, India.”
Ancient wildebeest-like animal shared ‘bizarre’ feature with dinosaur
By poring over the fossilized skulls of ancient wildebeest-like animals unearthed on Kenya’s Rusinga Island, researchers have discovered that the little-known hoofed mammals had a very unusual, trumpet-like nasal passage similar only to the nasal crests of lambeosaurine hadrosaur dinosaurs.
Oligocene primates from the Nsungwe Formation of Tanzania
Nancy Stevens
Nancy Stevens is a professor at Ohio University. She was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in the spring of 2011 for her project entitled “Oligocene primates from the Nsungwe Formation of Tanzania.”
The late Oligocene Nsungwe Formation (~25Ma) is located in the Rukwa Rift Basin in southwestern Tanzania. These deposits represent the only late Oligocene primate fossil
Micro-CT study of the Pleistocene human fossil teeth from Atapuerca
María Martinon-Torres at the Atapuerca sites. Photo credit: A. Canet.
María Martinon-Torres was awarded a Leakey Foundation research grant in the fall of 2012 for her project entitled “Micro-CT study of the Pleistocene human fossil teeth from Atapuerca.”
By allowing researchers to reconstruct the internal structures of fossil dental samples, MicroCT provides a new dataset of variables to characterize and