The twelfth annual Stony Brook Human Evolution Workshop was held at the Turkana Basin Institute’s (TBI) Turkwel research facility, between August 5-9th, 2014. The workshop was organized to mark the 50th Anniversary of the publication by Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and John Napier of the paper that established Homo habilis as a taxon (Leakey, L. S. [...]
The Spring 2014 Field School Vertebrate Paleontology module began this week with Prof. Mikael Fortelius who travelled to Turkana from Finland. Students are being introduced to the diversity and evolution of vertebrates in the Turkana Basin as well as the basic methods involved in searching for, documenting and collecting fossils in the field. This morning [...]
The Turkana ecosystem is home to a wide range of species, including many different kinds of insects. One of the challenges of understanding biodiversity is the fact that many species have not yet been classified, and are in general poorly known or studied. This is true for most of the remote, tropical areas of the [...]
The Spring 2014 Turkana Basin Institute Field School has begun! TBI Spring 2014 Field School Students! We started our journey of discovery at Lake Elementeita in the Great Rift Valley where we took an evening walk along the lakeshore. We got to see how incredibly high the lakes are - as lots of [...]
We are watching a total solar eclipse at TBI right now - here are a couple of photos... more soon Students watching the TOTAL solar eclipse The eclipse begins!
Today the Field School students spent the day in the field looking for fossils in three different sites: Lothodok, the edge of the Kalodir deposits and Maurorot. All these sites are north of TBI and represent different slices of time that have been preserved in the fossil record. Prof Boyer explains the importance of [...]
The Field School students visited different deposits in the Napedet Hills south of TBI this morning to look for fossils. This was to introduce the students to fieldwork and how fossils are located in the field, then how they get documented. We started at a Pleistocene Site The first fossil discovery of the [...]
The Turkana Basin Field School proceeds apace. Today the palaeontology module began with Prof Doug Boyer of Duke University who arrived at TBI yesterday. Prof Doug Boyer of Duke University One of the first exercises was putting the earth's history and timeline into perspective. It all started with a bang a [...]