The Leakey Foundation

Archives for paleontology

07.23.19

Ancient Saharan Seaway Illustrates How Earth’s Climate and Creatures Can Undergo Extreme Change

The region now holding the Sahara Desert was once underwater, in striking contrast to the present-day arid environment. This dramatic difference in climate over time is recorded in the rock and fossil record of West Africa during a time range that extends through the Cretaceous-Paleogene (KPg) boundary.

06.19.19

Leakey Foundation Grantee Featured in New PBS and Smithsonian Channel Film

In the News

In the new film “When Whales Walked: Journeys in Deep Time,” Leakey Foundation grantee and Wake Forest University anthropology professor Ellen Miller stands on a rocky hillside in northern Kenya carefully uncovering 16 million-year-old fossil elephant teeth. Miller is one of several scientists from around the world featured in the two-hour film, created in a first-ever partnership between PBS and Smithsonian Channel.

02.15.18

New Egyptian Dinosaur Reveals Ancient Link Between Africa and Europe

The course of dinosaur evolution in Africa has largely remained a mystery. But in the Sahara Desert of Egypt, scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that helps fill in some gaps in the fossil record of dinosaurs in Africa: Mansourasaurus shahinae, a school-bus-length, long-necked plant-eater with bony plates embedded in its skin.

02.28.17

Grantee Spotlight: Thierry Smith

Grantee Spotlight

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.”

02.17.16

Ancient wildebeest-like animal shared ‘bizarre’ feature with dinosaur

Journal Article

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.