Scientists look for dinosaurs, dig up humans instead

Last year I was fortunate enough to join the folks at Project Exploration on an honest-to-God dinosaur expedition, digging up fossils in Wyoming. PE is a great organization, headed by educator Gabrielle Lyon and paleontologist Paul Sereno, that works to get kids interested in science. I wasn’t able to make it to Wyoming this year (I was enjoying croissants in Paris, as I recall), but I wanted to point to PE’s latest project: a set of field updates on the web about a recent expedition to Niger.

Sereno has led several expeditions to Niger to search for fossils, coming back with such discoveries as an astonishing skeleton of SuperCroc (or Sarcosuchus Imperator, for you sticklers out there). During the 2000 expedition, the team stumbled across a remarkable find: remains of a Neolithic human settlement, perhaps 5,000 years old, with about 200 human skeletons in addition to countless artifacts of various sorts. Not being really equipped to take advantage of the find, the team protected the fossils as well as they could, with the idea of teaming up with archeologists and coming back later to excavate the site.

That return trip was just recently undertaken, and one of the team members was Shureice Kornegay, a graduate of PE’s Junior Paleontologist program who is now attending Norther Illinois University. Shureice and Paul have been writing these field updates that convey some of the excitement and challenge of such a major undertaking as this expedition. It’s great to read along as they cope with tipping water trucks and insect swarms of “biblical proportions.”

Some details about the expedition can be found in this communication to the team (pdf), which will fill you in both on the background of the site, and on what you need to bring with you when you’re about to head out to the Sahara to dig for bones! It’s good to be occasionally reminded that physics isn’t the only exciting science out there.