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100 million years ago, fierce predators, including flying reptiles and crocodile hunters, made the Sahara the most dangerous place on Earth.
This is according to an international team of scientists, who have published the largest review in nearly 100 years of fossil vertebrates from an area of Cretaceous rock formations in southeast Morocco, known as the Kem Kem Group.
The review, published in the journal ZooKeys, “provides a window into Africa’s dinosaur age,” according to lead author Dr. Nizar Ibrahim, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Detroit Mercy and a visiting researcher at the University from Portsmouth.
About 100 million years ago, the area was home to a vast river system, filled with many different species of aquatic and terrestrial animals. The Kem Kem Group fossils include three of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever known, including the saber-toothed Carcharodontosaurus (over 8m in length with huge jaws and long, jagged teeth up to eight inches long) and Deltadromeus (about 8 m long, a member of the raptor family with long hind limbs and unusually thin for their size), as well as several predatory flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and crocodile-like hunters. Dr. Ibrahim said: “This was possibly the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time traveler would not last long.”
Many of the predators relied on an abundant supply of fish, according to co-author Professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth. He said: “This place was full of absolutely huge fish, including the giant coelacanths and the lungfish. The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times greater than today’s coelacanth. There’s a huge freshwater saw shark called Onchopristis with the most fearsome rostral teeth, they’re like barbed daggers, but wonderfully brilliant. “
Researchers from the universities of Detroit, Chicago, Montana, Portsmouth (United Kingdom), Leicester (United Kingdom, David Unwin), Casablanca (Morocco) and McGill (Canada), as well as the Museum of Natural History in Paris, have produced the first Detailed report. and fully illustrated account of the fossil-rich scarp, formerly known as the “Kem Kem beds”. The researchers now define this sedimentary package as the Kem Kem Group, which consists of two distinct formations, the Gara Sbaa Formation and the Douira Formation.
To assemble the huge data sets and fossil images, which were originally included in his doctoral thesis, Dr. Ibrahim visited Kem Kem collections on various continents.
Shedding light on Africa’s ancient past is important, says Professor Martill: “This is the most comprehensive work on fossil vertebrates in the Sahara in almost a century, since the famous German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach published his last major work in 1936. “
PORTSMOUTH UNIVERSITY
Header Image – Predator Paradise – Giant predator dinosaur Carcharodontosaurus looks at a group of Elosuchus, crocodile hunters, near a corpse. Illustrations by Davide Bonadonna. Credit: Illustrations by Davide Bonadonna.
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