The 2003 Expedition isn’t just on a mission to find dinosaurs — we’re trying to paint a detailed picture of what life was like in Africa 90 million years ago. The discovery of a new, strange crocodile at our second campsite triggered our first round of “bone fever.”
Josh Miller, a University of Chicago grad student, suddenly thrust his hand to the sky, with a wail. “Wow, look at this!” There, perched between his fingers, was a monstrous croc tooth he had just plucked from the desert floor. We all gathered to marvel at the finding of a new species. No croc of this size — easily twice that of a large living croc — had ever been found in 90-million-year-old rocks in Africa.
It wouldn’t be long before more of the mystery croc surfaced.
A few days later, and 200 miles south of Josh’s find, we were brought to another stunning sight. “Jaws, incredible jaws,” stammered Jeff Stivers, a soft-spoken anthropology student from Colorado College. He pointed. There, along the tips of his toes, was a row of teeth, each nearly an inch in diameter, protruding from jaws diving into the desert floor.
“This is great! More of mystery croc! You got the front end!” I congratulated him.
We huddled around the find on our hands and knees and began to compare the new, curious croc with the well-known Sarcosuchus (a.k.a. SuperCroc). SuperCroc is a 40-foot-long, dinosaur-eating crocodile that haunted the waterways of Africa 110 million years ago — 20 million years earlier than the fossils now being unearthed by the team. What was this new croc? Could it be a smaller relative of Sarcosuchus, a lineage that had gone extinct? Or is it possibly even more closely related to living crocs?
As the crew followed the jaws into the rock with brushes, small picks and dental tools, more of the skull emerged. The work continued well into the afternoon: Bony armor plates from the back surfaced, as did tail vertebrae. We assessed our water, plaster and burlap. We had just enough to encase the discovery in a “jacket” and bring it back to camp.
After hours of work under intense desert sun and temperatures that reached 120 degrees, the jacket encasing the skull was complete. Weighing in at about 300 pounds, the team lifted and shoved it into the back of a Land Rover.
This team isn’t only motivated by extinct reptiles. For one of us, in particular, living reptiles are worth getting excited over too.
A recent University of Chicago graduate and a research assistant in the Field Museum’s herpetology department, Luke Mahler seems to have a natural attraction for reptiles. One afternoon, as we were driving to our next prospecting area, Luke sighted a familiar shape. “A monitor!” he shouted into the radio.
Taking measurements
The vehicles made a hurried stop. Alarmed by the rumble of the approaching expedition convoy, a beautiful lizard vaulted its 2-foot-long, scaly body down a burrow under a long-abandoned truck tire. With gloved hand, Luke pulled the tan lizard from its hideaway for measurements before releasing it to scurry back down its hole.
That night, as dark was falling, Luke pulled a chair a short distance from camp to write in his journal. Minutes later, he found a venomous snake coiled between the legs of the chair, inches from his feet. Thrilled by his late-night visitor, he bagged the beast, and proudly showed the team the next morning before he released it — a good distance from camp.
Reptiles are one thing; the desert’s living invertebrates — insects, scorpions and arachnids known as wind scorpions — tend to generate more stress than excitement. This year was a wet one by Saharan standards, with some areas receiving as much as 2 inches of rain, and the water has gotten the desert crawling. As a result, we have taken to choosing our campsites carefully. “Almost no bugs here,” I proclaimed with confidence, as the crew set about erecting the big tents at Camp Two.
But by the following evening, what had been a bug-free zone transformed: Hundreds of locusts began dive-bombing the camp, attracted by the water, vivid colors and night lights. Each evening, the party grew. By week’s end, thousands of locusts had invaded our desert home.
Even Carol Gudanowski, a recent University of Chicago graduate and one expedition member not particularly fond of six-legged creepy crawlers, couldn’t help but be drawn in when the team spotted an illustration of the food chain in action. She was shivering — but fascinated — as she joined the group watching a locust being eaten by a preying mantis, which, in the same moment, was being eaten by a wind scorpion.
When members of the team aren’t pitting wind scorpions gladiator-style against dung beetles in arenas made of coffee cans, or scooping up cold-blooded reptiles for measurement, we can sometimes be found collecting recent skeletons for a comparative study collection — our best addition to date is a dinosaur descendant Luke found after a long day of fossil prospecting.
“Complete bird, we got to check it out,” announced eagle-eyed Luke, who had spotted the feathered carcass against yellowed grass on our way back to camp one afternoon. I swung the Land Rover around. Sure enough, a large vulture lay there, untouched by scavengers, but swarmed by hundreds of dermestid beetles, which were fast reducing its remains to a skeleton, virtually intact.
Luke and Andy Gray bagged the reeking remains, and as they tied it to the roof rack, we could hear the beetles scratching around in the bag.
We are, however, on a paleontology expedition, and this is our primary obsession.
I caught my breath when I spotted a 3-inch-long neck vertebra on the side of a hill. Walking carefully along the trail of fragments, I spotted the rest of the neck diving into the red rock. Other slender bones projected from the hillside.
“I think it’s a small theropod!” I yelled out and called French paleontologist Ronan Allain over to the site. Ronan, who had just finished his doctorate on predatory dinosaurs from France, was wide-eyed as he began to pore over the bones beside me.
“They’re hollow, and the neck is clearly inclined upward” he noted. Other team members arrived and helped brush back the sediment and gather wayward pieces. Each of us knew what the others were thinking: Could this possibly be a raptor?
Velociraptor and Compsognathus of “Jurassic Park” fame belong to a group of small predatory dinosaurs often referred to as “raptors.” For dinosaur aficionados, the list of precious raptors is long and includes the sickle-toed Deinonychus and the fleet-footed Troodon from Montana. Recently named raptors include the feathered Sinornithosaurus and Microraptor from China.
Northern climes inhabitants
To date, raptors share one common characteristic — they all come from northern continents. The fossil evidence for raptor-size dinosaurs is terribly lopsided. There is almost no information available from southern landmasses such as Africa.
As we continued to work to figure out how much of the “raptor” skeleton was preserved, we came across the tail of another, larger, predatory dinosaur less than a foot away. The bones of the smaller “raptor” were so delicate that we dared not expose them further in the field for fear of damaging them. We dug around our new, little southern “raptor,” and took all the bones in a single jacket. Doubtless a new species, the small predator will remain an exciting enigma until the jacket is opened and cleaned in the lab back at the University of Chicago.
With new crocs, and two new predators jacketed we are just halfway into the field season — and the outlines of the story of what life was like in Africa at the end of the dinosaur era are starting to take shape.
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Project Exploration is a non-profit science education organization co-founded by paleontologist Paul Sereno and his wife, educator Gabrielle Lyon, to make science accessible to the public — especially city kids and girls. For more stories and photos from the 2003 Niger Expedition, log on to bancodeprofissionais.com/dino and www.projectexploration.org.
