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.
Leakey Foundation Grantee Featured in New PBS and Smithsonian Channel Film
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.
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.
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.