Today, the Sahara Desert is one of the most unforgiving places on Earth. It’s very hot, barren, and hosts blinding dust storms. Now, a team of scientists from universities and museums in five countries has discovered that more than 100 million years ago, the Sahara was just as unsafe ; What’s more, it was the most dangerous place on the planet, but for very different reasons than today.
Located along the border of Morocco and Algeria is the Kem Kem Group , a well-documented and highly fossiliferous rock formation that contains records of life forms on Earth spanning tens of millions of years. It is a place where the fossilized remains of cartilaginous and bony fish, turtles, pterosaurs, dinosaurs, as well as plants and fossil remains have been documented by paleontologists for decades. The most recent excavations have revealed the remains of dozens of species of fierce predators, including flying reptiles and crocodile-like carnivores.
The experts compared expedition notes and records from the Kem Kem formation over decades, and reviewed data sets of fossil records housed in museums around the world. The result is what the researchers call the “most comprehensive work on fossil Sahara vertebrates in nearly a century,” and provides information on the location and date of when and where the most dangerous place in Earth’s history was: the Sahara. .
And it is that the beds of Kem Kem housed in the past a vast river system , full of many different species of aquatic and terrestrial animals.
The fossils of this formation include three of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever known , including Carcharodontosaurus (saber-toothed lizard, over eight meters long with huge jaws and long, sharp teeth up to 20 cm in length), Deltadromeus ( a member of the raptor family with long, slender hind limbs, eight meters long) and several pterosaurs.
“This was possibly the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time traveler would not last long,” said Nizar Ibrahim, a researcher at the University of Detroit Mercy and the University of Portsmouth.
“This place was full of absolutely colossal fish, including the giant coelacanths and the lungfish or dipnoo. The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times larger than the current coelacanth, “explained David Martill, a scientist at the University of Portsmouth.” There is a huge freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome rostral teeth on the planet. ; they are like barbed daggers, but wonderfully brilliant. “
The current study, published in the journal Zookeys , represents the largest review in nearly 100 years of fossils from Cretaceous rock formations in southeastern Morocco, known as the Kem Kem Group, since the famous German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach published his last major job in 1936.
Referencia: N. Ibrahim et al. 2020. Geology and paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous Kem Kem Group of eastern Morocco. ZooKeys 928: 1-216; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.928.47517
