Well where do I start, which is the most interesting news for this April blog, our fossil collecting in the Sahara, the volcanic eruptions or the eruption to our travel schedule. We are on a long sojourn this trip, our third trip in the last 5 months to this incredible North African state, not of our own making, yet somehow typical of navigating along the top of Africa through these wonderful Atlas Mountain regions which never fail to uplift and surprise
Erfoud, cattle market day.
[Only 60km north of Taouz and beyond that thousands of kilometres of desert plains and dunes
Life here is full of colour, wildlife erupts in this season of the year, we saw raised gardens atop the garden perimeter walls of Erfoud, the far south eastern enclave of the western desert of Morocco
So this splash of vibrant colour, as we conducted our business, was delightful and lifted our sometimes weary spirits. Working in this climate and region can be arduous at times and of course frustrating if no gems turn up for us. However this trip has paid dividends beyond our expectations.There will soon be good material on the website to view.Here now a brief summary of what we saw on our travels, not necessary all we secured.
you may have seen in the previous blog some marvellous dinosaur material, trace fossils, footprints of amazingly Cacharodontosaurus and a large sauropod. truly spectacular fossil plates, a real joy to see them out of the desert, fresh-as it were. One could say, although 100 million years or so fresh.Morocco’s fish beds are becoming very interesting and we do hope more spectacular specimens will be recovered from this Taouz site in time.
We saw the usual good selection of trilobites and among these some fabulously large and fine Paradoxides trilobite plates,
we secured several on the basis of while excellent specimens are still available we need them, soon this may change like so many things from this region, fossils are thinning out, many, so many fossils over the last few years have reduced to a trickle of production compared to the last 20 years and in this vein the quality drastically diminishes as old beds are reworked to produce lesser quality material, once passed over, due to the termination of the fossil works.At one time the dinosaur beds in the Kem Kem region produce open site collections, i.e. very good teeth collected from open ground in the Sahara, literally picked of the surface or just under the surface, eventually the sites were collected out and then excavations began several years ago, now 4 or 5 metres deep the workings are totally exhausted. It is a reasonable assumption that the days of any decent teeth in numbers are over in this region and this will dry up completely very soon.
To complicate this, in the region where the beds are it is so close to the Algerian border and that it is extremely dangerous, incidents involving the Algerian and Moroccan militia and tribal bandit activity, which in some cases have actually resulted in people being shot at, to my knowledge one reported death and of a man that was collecting the mineral desert rose, shot at around low light dusk time from a distance by one of the border patrols.
Near this region 10,000 Polisario, nomadic people are housed in tented townships beyond an area of land which is heavily mined inside the Algerian border, waiting to repatriate this territory from Morocco. So it is a hotbed of activity, really a powder keg which could set off at any time. Fossil collecting can be a complicated industry in this region of the world.
Back to our expedition, fine crinoids where few however we secured several good plates, several single head plates and a few good death assemblages.
As I say dinosaur material , bone and teeth has been poor of late yet we did secure a bunch of good teeth out of the best available and one or two superb, albeit smaller Cacharodontosaurs examples.
Two great hand claws from spinosaurus.
We are hoping to get back to the UK next week, meanwhile our team in Lancashire are busy as ever taking your enquiries while suffer in the heat of the desert hotel, feet up by a pool, sipping mint tea writing this blog report, well someone’s got to do it!
More soon….
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