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WHY AFRICA?
Why bring a team of 14 people, five Land Rovers, a ton and a half of dehydrated food, tools, 80 bags of plaster, 50 rolls of burlap and a power chute flying machine into the world's largest desert to look for dinosaurs?

Sand dunes intermingle with fossil-bearing rocks in
the area under exploration from Camp 2.

The first dinosaurs were unearthed and named more than 150 years ago and nearly 500 dinosaurs have been named since then. That's why it's hard to imagine that there aren't any dinosaurs left to be found.

But there are!

There is a place where dinosaur bones poke out of the ground, a place almost as big as the continental United States. And most of these dinosaurs have never been discovered or named.

Hard at work on the sauropod skeleton, and with one thigh bone ready to go,
at this point in the excavation, the team still has no idea how much has yet to be uncovered. - Photo by Gabe Lyon

Where is this place? Africa's Sahara Desert.

Now, you might wonder: how could a fossil treasure trove like this be left to the wind and sand all these years? The answer is simple: it is difficult to work in the Sahara. It is no small challenge to bring out the supplies you need, survive the heat, wind and sand, and then somehow dig up and transport tons of fossil bone to a laboratory on the other side of the globe for cleaning and study.

EARLY WORK IN THE SAHARA

European paleontologists made the first scientific reports on dinosaur bones from the Sahara more than 50 years ago. When we first came to work in the Tenere in 1997, we had been preceded by the work of two French paleontologists: Albert Lapparent in the1940s and Philippe Taquet in the 1960s and early 70s.

Lapparent did much of his prospecting alone or with an assistant and often prospected on camelback. There were no paved roads anywhere in the desert. In preliminary surveys of the desert, he found and described isolated dinosaur bones and giant crocodile teeth.

Spotted from the window of a moving Land Rover, the fossilized vertebrae and thigh bone of this dinosaur, exposed on the desert floor, are worth a closer look.

Twenty years later Lapparent returned to the area, joined by a young colleague, Philippe Taquet. After three expeditions, Taquet and his team discovered and named several dinosaurs including single skeletons of two plant-eating dinosaurs - Ouranosaurus ("Southern reptile") and Lourdosaurus ("heavy reptile.") Ouranosaurus is a sail-backed forerunner of duck-billed dinosaurs while Lourdosaurus, like its close cousin Iguanodon, has an enormous thumb spike. Lapparent and Taquet found evidence of other dinosaurs, including large hand-claws and jaw fragments from predatory dinosaurs, but not enough to understand what these dinosaurs looked like.

Even their preliminary work suggested a rich fauna. In addition to dinosaurs they found other reptiles, including the skull of a huge crocodile, which they named Sarcosuchus, and three turtle species.

Our guide relaxes in the midday sun,
while the expedition team checks out a new discovery

Why didn't French paleontologists like Albert de Lapparent or Philippe Taquet find Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops, well-known dinosaurs from North America? That's because Africa's dinosaurs are unique.

When Lapparent searched the Sahara in the 1940s, most scientists believed the world's continents were fixed in position. Now we know that when dinosaurs first evolved around 230 million years ago, the continents were stuck together as a supercontinent called "Pangaea." Over millions of years, that huge landmass fractured apart into the continents we know today.

Right Illustration:
Map of The World(A), Africa and Niger(B) during the Cretaceous Period

For much of the Cretaceous period (140-65 million years ago), Africa was an island continent, surrounded by oceans and seas. New plant-eating and meat-eating dinosaurs evolved on Africa that looked quite different from two-legged Tyrannosaurus and three-horned Triceratops. In fact, not a single bone of a tyrannosaur or horned dinosaur has ever been found in the Sahara.