Africa is central to hypotheses for the origin of several vertebrate clades, including the placental group Afrotheria. However, despite the large size of the continent, its Mesozoic record of mammals is the among most poorly known of all continents.

Late Triassic & Late Jurassic of Ethiopia

  • Ethiopia is well known for its early hominid sites, but it also has vast exposures of Mesozoic continental deposits.
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  • In the 1990s, Mark Goodwin, C.B. Wood, Chuck Schaff, Bill Clemens, and Howard Hutchison started the Blue Nile Project to document vertebrate faunas in the Upper Triassic Adigrat Sandstone (~237–174 Ma) and Upper Jurassic Mugher Mudstone (~152 Ma) of Ethiopia’s northwestern plateau. 
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  • ​Now led by Mark, Randy Irmis, Tadesse Berhanu, and Greg Wilson Mantilla, we have made short collecting trips with small teams in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018.
 
  • The Mugher Mudstone preserves a rich vertebrate fauna of actinopterygian fish, lungfish, crocodyliforms, turtles, theropods, sauropods, ornithischians, and a “peramuran” mammal. In 2018, we found the first associated sauropod bones from Ethiopia! 
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  • Due to political events, we have not returned to Ethiopia since 2018.
Funding: NSF-CNIC 1443845 "Collaborative Research: US-Ethiopia planning visit for the investigation of non-marine Mesozoic ecosystems from the Northwestern Plateau, Ethiopia"

Cretaceous of Niger

  • In expeditions led by Paul Sereno (1995, 1997, 2000), we collected over 4,000 kg of fossiliferous sediment from the Cenomanian Kem Kem beds of southeastern Morocco and the Cretaceous of the Iullemmeden Basin of Niger (Barremian Tiouraren Formation, Aptian-Albian Elrhaz Fm, Cenomanian Farak Fm). We have screenwashed and picked some samples and descriptions of the recovered vertebrate microfossil faunas are underway.
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