The most dangerous place on Earth 100 million years ago

The world feels like a scary place these days, but a recently published paleontology study helps put things in perspective. A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago a portion of the Sahara Desert was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet, with a concentration of large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any comparable modern terrestrial ecosystem.

The analysis of fossils from the so-called Kem Kem beds — rock formations in southeastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, dating back to the Cretaceous period — shows the presence in the area of large scale carnivorous dinosaurs, flying predatory reptiles, and crocodile-like hunters, all living together in what was at the time a river system full of very large fish, rather than a desert.

The creatures found in the Kem Kem beds roamed the Earth some 95 million years before early humans appeared on the planet, but “if you had a time machine and could travel to this place, you probably wouldn’t last very long,” said palaeontologist Nizar Ibrahim, lead author of the study.

Ibrahim told CNN that the Kem Kem ecosystem was “a really mysterious place, ecologically speaking,” since typical ecosystems present a larger number of plant-eating animals than predators, and predators themselves will come in a variety of sizes, with one larger predator being dominant.

In the Kem Kem, fossils of predators outnumber those of plant-eating dinosaurs, and several of the predators living together in the area, such as the Carcharodontosaurus, the Spinosaurus, the Abelisaur and the Deltadromeus, were as big as a Tyrannosaurus rex.

This is unusual “even for dinosaur standards,” according to Ibrahim, since the T. rex, which was present in North America tens of millions of years later, was “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”

An abelisaur, a predatory dinosaur, rests while several pterosaurs fight over leftovers from a carcass. Artwork by Davide Bonadonna, under the scientific supervision of Simone Maganuco and Nizar Ibrahim.

It is unlikely that the large predators in the Kem Kem ate one another.

What’s more realistic, according to Ibrahim, is that they ate the abundant and supersized fish present in the area — fish like coelacanths “the size of a car” and sawfish that could reach 25 feet in length.

What did some of the large predators in the Kem Kem ecosystem look like?

Matthew Lamanna, a palaeontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said the meat-eating Carcharodontosaurus would resemble a Tyrannosaurus rex in shape and size, but “with a proportionally narrower head, somewhat longer arms, and three fingers (rather than two) on each hand.”

The even larger Spinosaurus would look somewhat like “the unholy love child of Carcharodontosaurus and a crocodile,” said Lamanna, with a crocodile-like skull and teeth and a body that is a mix of both, but with longer forelimbs. A fish-eating water creature, the Spinosaurus’ most distinctive feature is “a six-foot-tall sail running the length of its back.”
The Abelisaur would be smaller than a Spinosaurus, and “vaguely bulldog-faced,” according to Lamanna.

The Deltadromeus, known only from an incomplete skeleton, was also presumably similar in size to a T. rex, said Lamanna. According to Ibrahim, the Deltadromeus presents very slender proportions in its legs and a very long tail, and it remains mysterious in the absence of fossil evidence of its neck and skull.

Among the other species present in the Kem Kem were “predatory crocodiles that would be at least as big as any that are alive today” and flying reptiles like Pterosaurs “that would dwarf any modern flying bird,” Lamanna told CNN.

The study of the Kem Kem beds carried out by Ibrahim and a group of international researchers across the US, UK, Europe and Africa draws attention to the importance of learning more about the palaeontology of Africa, among other areas of the Southern Hemisphere.
Forgotten continent

“Africa, in many ways, remains palaeontology’s forgotten continent,” said Ibrahim, and this study “addresses this bias.” Even though the accessibility of evidence and its degree of preservation in the African continent varies widely, there remains so much more to be discovered in Africa.

What the Kem Kem research shows is that African ecosystems “do not simply replicate the ones we know from North America, or Europe, or other better-known places,” and it also reveals clues about what happens to life when dramatic changes in climate come into play.

Evidence in the rock layers in the Kem Kem Group shows that the river system where predators and large fish thrived eventually became flooded with seawater, turning the area into a warm, shallow sea. Fast forward to today and that same area is in the largest hot desert in the world.

Palaeontology can help us understand “the long term consequences of biodiversity loss, which we are experiencing right now,” said Ibrahim.

700,000 Ancient African Books survived in Timbuktu University, Mali

Many writers on African history did not believe until recently that African societies had any sort of tradition of writing. This idea has gradually lost recognition since the rediscovery of ancient collections of manuscripts, some dating back to at least the 8th century A.D.

In present-day Ethiopia, about 250,000 old manuscripts from the Timbuktu libraries survive. Also, at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages have been dugout.

In the western African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez, thousands of more ancient manuscripts have survived similarly.

Approximately 1 million manuscripts have since managed to survive from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean, against the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering.

National Geographic also predicts 700,000 manuscripts in the city of Timbuktu alone have survived.

Local families and institutions still own and maintain over 60 libraries in Timbuktu, some of which are collections that survived the turmoil through the city, as well as the ravages of nature.

The Ahmed Baba Institute, established in 1979 and named after the famous scholar of the 16th/17th century, considered the greatest in Africa, is a true example of this.

Today, the institute has only about thirty thousand manuscripts, which are constantly being examined, catalogued and stored, but at the time of the French colonial administration of Timbuktu (1894-1959), many of the manuscripts were taken by the occupying colonialists and brought to light.

As a result, many families there are still refusing to allow researchers entry, anticipating a repeat of the French treatment. Many texts were lost due to climatic effects including drought, which forced many people to bury them and evacuate.

Of the surviving manuscripts, these are:

* Main Islamic texts include Korans, hadith collections (actions or prophet’s sayings), Sufi texts and devotional texts

* Activities of the Islamic law school in Maliki

* ‘Muslim science’ texts, including grammar, mathematics and astronomy

* Historical works from the area, including contracts, commentaries, historical chronicles, poetry, and marginal notes and jottings, proving to be a remarkably rich source of historical evidence.

For whatever reason, much of the manuscripts themselves are of great interest to the owners. For example, those who have so far claimed royalty have been found to be from the servile class because of the manuscripts’ evidence.

Certain documents also exposed one family’s atrocious relations with another, which may have occurred a very long time ago but still have meaning to this day. As in contested ownership of land and properties.

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These raise the question as to why to this day these manuscripts are of utmost importance. Many of those in possession of the manuscripts hid them during colonial times or even had them buried.

In addition, French was forcibly introduced as the region’s language and instruction, meaning that many owners lost their ability to read and understand the manuscripts in the languages they were originally written in.

Eventually, it wasn’t until 1985 that much energy was breathed into this region’s academic life, meaning it would take a long time to fully understand the full scope and import of the manuscripts that were found.

Newly named human species may be the direct ancestor of modern humans

Live Science reports that paleoanthropologist Mirjana Roksandic of the University of Winnipeg and her colleagues suggest renaming some human ancestors after examining fossils dating from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago.

The newly proposed species, Homo bodoensis — which lived more than half a million years ago in Africa — may help to untangle how human lineages moved and interacted across the globe.

Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, other human species once roamed Earth. For example, scientists recently discovered that the Indonesian island Flores was once home to the extinct species Homo floresiensis, often known as “the hobbit” for its miniature body.

Deciding whether a set of ancient human fossils belongs to one species or another is often a challenging problem open to heated debate. For instance, some researchers suggest that skeletal differences between modern humans and Neanderthals mean they were different species.

However, other scientists argue that because there is recent abundant genetic evidence that modern humans and Neanderthals once interbred and had fertile, viable offspring, Neanderthals should not be considered a single species.

In the new study, researchers analyzed human fossils dating from about 774,000 to 129,000 years ago (once known as the Middle Pleistocene and now renamed the Chibanian). Previous work suggested modern humans arose during this time in Africa, while Neanderthals emerged in Eurasia. However, much about this key chapter in human evolution remains poorly understood — a problem paleoanthropologists call “the muddle in the middle.”

Chibanian-era human fossils from Africa and Eurasia are often assigned to one of two species: Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. However, both species often carried multiple, and often contradictory, definitions of the skeletal characteristics and other traits that described them.

Recent DNA evidence has revealed that some fossils in Europe dubbed H. heidelbergensis were actually from early Neanderthals. As such, H. heidelbergensis was a redundant name in those cases, the scientists noted.

Similarly, recent analyses of many fossils in East Asia now suggest they should no longer be called H. heidelbergensis, the researchers added. For instance, many facial and other features seen in Chibanian East Asian human fossils differ from those seen in European and African fossils of the same age.

In addition, Chibanian fossils from Africa are sometimes called both H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis. The scientists also noted that H. rhodesiensis was a poorly defined label that was never widely accepted in science, due in part to its association with controversial English imperialist Cecil Rhodes. 

To help deal with all this confusion, the researchers now propose the existence of a new species, H. bodoensis, named after a 600,000-year-old skull found in Bodo D’ar, Ethiopia, in 1976.

This new name would encompass many fossils previously identified as either H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis.

The researchers suggest that H. bodoensis was the direct ancestor of H. sapiens, together forming a different branch of the human family tree than the one that gave rise to the Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans, which Siberian and Tibetan fossils suggested they lived about the same time as their Neanderthal cousins.

“Giving a new name to a species is always controversial,” study co-lead author Mirjana Roksandic, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, told Live Science. “However, if people start using it, it will survive and live.”

In this new classification, H. bodoensis will describe most Chibanian human fossils from Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Many Chibanian human fossils from Europe would get reclassified as Neanderthals. The names H. heidelbergensis and H. rhodesiensis would then disappear. Chibanian human fossils from East Asia may get their own names with more research.

“We are not claiming to rewrite human evolution,” Roksandic said. Instead, the researchers seek to organize the variation seen in ancient humans “in a way that makes it possible to discuss where it comes from and what it represents,” she explained. “Those differences can help us understand movement and interaction.”

In the future, the researchers want to see if they can find any H. bodoensis specimens in Europe from the Chibanian, Roksandic said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday (Oct. 28) in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues News, and Reviews.