The Pleistocene is sometimes called the Ice Age, but ice was as rare 2 million years ago as it is today in the Turkana Basin. Instead the glaciers in the north caused the deserts and arid grasslands to expand as the ice advanced and the expansion of the forests when the ice retreated. Our early [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Fossils usually aren’t very pretty when they come out of the ground. They’re usually caked in sediment or broken into tiny pieces that need to be reassembled. After they’ve been cleaned and put back together, the fossil is ready for interpretation, description, and display. Easier said than done. The process of getting a [...]
African mammals started out weird. When the dinosaurs bowed out sixty-five million years ago after a rough season with a few Indian volcanoes and a rough weekend with an asteroid near Cancun, Africa was already a continent adrift. Much like the modern island continent of Australia, home to unique mammalian lineages like kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, [...]
The Turkana Basin if famous for preserving the fossilized remains of our bipedal ancestors. But, there are more than fossil hominins in the rocks piled up around Lake Turkana. The remains of horses, pigs, fish, hyaenas, and hippos (lots of hippos) also tumble from the rock, providing the ecological and environmental context for the evolution [...]