Latest news with #Saharan
Yahoo
a day ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
SEC lookahead: Is a young Georgia still a dangerous Georgia?
Georgia head coach Kirby Smart looks on during the first quarter of the spring G Day game at Sanford Stadium in April. (Photo by) ATLANTA — At SEC Media Days this week, Texas is the story. (Well, aside from the rumor that Nick Saban is returning to coaching. But that's just a rumor. For now.) Texas as a program is the likely preseason favorite to win the SEC, and Arch Manning is the week's most anticipated student-athlete participant. Burnt orange is doing its best to smother the SEC. Kirby Smart and Georgia would like a word. Advertisement Georgia is now two-plus years removed from its last national championship, which in the Kirby Smart era qualifies as a Saharan dry spell. The Dawgs missed out on the final four-team playoff after the 2023 season, and fell to Notre Dame in the quarterfinals of last year's expanded CFP after losing starting quarterback Carson Beck to injury. So Georgia has something to prove, but it will have to do so with a class that has zero familiarity with winning national championships. 'Our team is going to be comprised of 54 percent first- and second-year players,' Smart said. 'The COVID class (with an extra year of eligibility) has kind of aged out, so we had multiple players that were in their fifth and sixth year last year, especially across the offensive and defensive lines.' Naturally, Smart is spinning that youthfulness into a positive, noting that the extremely young class brings 'youthful exuberance' to Athens. Advertisement 'I think the biggest thing that separates college football teams today is complacency among players versus fire, passion and energy among players,' he said. 'Our players need to bring juice and energy each and every day. If they don't, they'll be confronted by the players that do.' One of those newcomers: quarterback Gunner Stockton, who was pressed into emergency service late last year but now has the starting job outright. 'He's the kind of kid you want at the front of the line, and he leads from the front,' Smart said. 'He's going to be a big part of our program this year in leadership.' Smart hinted at the Georgia program's largest question mark — the offensive and defensive lines — and later in his press conference on Tuesday indicated why there might not be a quick fix if the team starts slow in its effort to develop its younger players. 'You don't speed up development,' he said. 'If you want to speed up development, then you're probably looking for shortcuts that don't exist. You want to develop somebody. It takes time. It takes reps. We can't replicate reps faster. We can't speed up a guy's transition.' With Carson Beck off to Miami, the Bulldogs will pin their hopes on Gunner Stockton at quarterback. () (Todd Kirkland via Getty Images) In other words, Georgia won't have much time to get those youthfully exuberant players up to Smart's standards. The Bulldogs will begin the season with two non-conference games to provide them a little bit of a buffer before diving full-fledged into its SEC schedule, which begins with Tennessee and Alabama and runs right on through that date with Texas in mid-November. (Smart didn't say it, but we will: the Dawgs beat Texas twice last season. Just so everyone remembers.) Advertisement On the plus side, while Georgia's 2025 schedule is a brutal one, it breaks very much in the Dawgs' favor — the two marquee games, Texas and Alabama, will both kick off between the hedges at Sanford Stadium. Georgia will need to go on the road to face Tennessee and Auburn, and neutral-site trap games against Florida and Georgia Tech also loom, but having a home crowd behind them for the two biggest games of the season will be immensely valuable. Smart remains one of the sharper observers of the college football condition, though obviously with a pro-coaching bias. He sees a way through college football's current travails, and to him, it's all about having the right people in the right places. 'College athletics and college football is not broken,' Smart said. 'I would say that it's in a time of change and influx, that … you have to navigate better than your competitor, whether that's conference to conference or within your own conference. We continue to find ways to do that at the University of Georgia. We sell relationships over transactions. We think the relationship still wins out because the relationship allows you to push people and demand excellence, and we're going to continue to do that at Georgia.' It's worked out pretty well so far.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Bryan Norcross: Disturbance continues to drench Florida, could develop in Gulf
Updated at 9 a.m. ET, Tuesday, July 15, 2025 The tropical disturbance that created bands of torrential tropical downpours on Monday will move across the Florida Peninsula on Tuesday. Heavy rain with local flooding and frequent lightning is likely over the Florida Peninsula once again. Stay aware of flood alerts that are issued by the National Weather Service. The disturbance is showing some signs of a circulation, but it's disorganized and broad. The air is already extremely humid over Florida, and the disturbance is bringing more tropical moisture with it. The moisture combined with the heating of the day will likely produce intense, slow-moving thunderstorms – the type that can cause local flooding. The system is forecast to move into the Gulf tomorrow where it might have a chance to organize over the very warm water. The National Hurricane Center has the odds of it becoming at least a tropical depression in the medium range. According to the computer forecasts, if it does develop an organized circulation, it's most likely to do it late tomorrow or early Thursday when it is approaching Louisiana. Interestingly, most of the computer forecasts show a fairly weak system in the vicinity of southeastern Louisiana by Thursday. But the new Google experimental AI model and some others indicate that the system could quickly spin up into a reasonably strong storm. The name would be Tropical Storm Dexter. The idea is that the model gives us a reasonable range of possibilities, so we know what to ready for. It's not a forecast as much as it's a heads up. So the strength of the system is an open question, but the very heavy rain over the northern Gulf coast from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana looks likely. Be ready for flood watches to be issued for areas along the coast. As always, forecasts for disorganized or just developing systems are subject to greater errors and often have to be adjusted when and if a consolidated circulation develops. Elsewhere in the Atlantic, a robust tropical disturbance is midway between Africa and the Caribbean. It's on a southern track and will likely bring a noticeable moisture surge to the southeastern Caribbean islands and Venezuela late in the week. The tropical ocean is still blanketed with dry air and Saharan dust, so development is not expected. But it's a reminder that the African disturbance-producing system is working. The ocean water temperatures are warming between the Caribbean and Africa, so in a couple of weeks, we'll start looking in that direction for possible article source: Bryan Norcross: Disturbance continues to drench Florida, could develop in Gulf
Rhyl Journal
a day ago
- Climate
- Rhyl Journal
Brits going to Spain this month issued heatwave alert
The Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) has issued severe weather alerts across key holiday hotspots, including Andalusia, Murcia, and the Balearic Islands. These warnings include red and orange alerts for heat, as well as one for the Saharan dust haze in parts of eastern Spain and the islands. The severe weather alerts are affecting key holiday hotspots, including Andalusia, Murcia, and the Balearic Islands. (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto) Jessie Chambers, a travel specialist at Global Work and Travel, has shared essential tips on the things you should not do during the Spanish heatwave flagged by the AEMET. The expert warns UK travellers coming to Spain that a sudden temperature drop can "shock your system". She has, instead, recommended cooling down gradually, using lukewarm water and cooling cloths. While they can be a useful tool, fans can also circulate hot air once the room temperature exceeds 35C. These should be combined with cold water bottles, mist sprays, or damp sheets for better results. Digesting heavy foods can sometimes raise your body temperature. Travellers should try eating light, water-rich snacks like fruit, salad and yoghurt. Plastic bottles may leach chemicals in extreme heat, and devices left on sun loungers can overheat quickly or become damaged. Surfaces can reach "scorching" temperatures and cause burns. The expert has called on Brits to always wear sandals or flip-flops, even for short distances. Should you open or close your windows during a heatwave? Expert settles debate What are Met Office and UKHSA cold-health and heat-health alerts? Foreign Office reveals all the countries UK holidaymakers should avoid Sleeping in extreme heat can increase your risk of heat exhaustion. If your room doesn't have AC, take your nap in the morning, not the afternoon, Jessie Chambers has advised. Evenings can still hover above 30C, especially inland. To combat this, she had told tourists to avoid long walks after dark unless essential, and to keep water with them at all times.
North Wales Chronicle
a day ago
- Climate
- North Wales Chronicle
Brits going to Spain this month issued heatwave alert
The Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) has issued severe weather alerts across key holiday hotspots, including Andalusia, Murcia, and the Balearic Islands. These warnings include red and orange alerts for heat, as well as one for the Saharan dust haze in parts of eastern Spain and the islands. The severe weather alerts are affecting key holiday hotspots, including Andalusia, Murcia, and the Balearic Islands. (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto) Jessie Chambers, a travel specialist at Global Work and Travel, has shared essential tips on the things you should not do during the Spanish heatwave flagged by the AEMET. The expert warns UK travellers coming to Spain that a sudden temperature drop can "shock your system". She has, instead, recommended cooling down gradually, using lukewarm water and cooling cloths. While they can be a useful tool, fans can also circulate hot air once the room temperature exceeds 35C. These should be combined with cold water bottles, mist sprays, or damp sheets for better results. Digesting heavy foods can sometimes raise your body temperature. Travellers should try eating light, water-rich snacks like fruit, salad and yoghurt. Plastic bottles may leach chemicals in extreme heat, and devices left on sun loungers can overheat quickly or become damaged. Surfaces can reach "scorching" temperatures and cause burns. The expert has called on Brits to always wear sandals or flip-flops, even for short distances. Should you open or close your windows during a heatwave? Expert settles debate What are Met Office and UKHSA cold-health and heat-health alerts? Foreign Office reveals all the countries UK holidaymakers should avoid Sleeping in extreme heat can increase your risk of heat exhaustion. If your room doesn't have AC, take your nap in the morning, not the afternoon, Jessie Chambers has advised. Evenings can still hover above 30C, especially inland. To combat this, she had told tourists to avoid long walks after dark unless essential, and to keep water with them at all times.
National Geographic
a day ago
- Science
- National Geographic
How to dig up 55 tons of dinosaur bones from the world's fiercest desert
Inside the boldest fossil hunt ever attempted. A team of paleontologists led by National Geographic Explorer Paul Sereno uncovered a trove of dinosaur fossils in the Sahara desert in Niger, including this long-necked herbivore called a sauropod. Working under floodlights after dark relieved the crew from oppressive daytime heat. It also lengthened workdays, permitting excavation, in less than three months, of three different areas separated by forbidding stretches of desert. Photographs by Keith Ladzinski As the Saharan sun rose on my waylaid team, one morning in September 2022, it seemed to burn with particular intensity. For nearly three weeks we'd been holed up in a mud-walled compound in the oasis town of Agadez, in central Niger, stalled because of officials' insistence on assembling for us a large armed escort. Now, as dawn broke, we were finally ready to embark: Nearly a hundred people packed into 15 vehicles, a motley caravan of SUVs, pickups, and one large dump truck, all strapped with sand ladders and spare tires, heading out on an extraordinary desert dinosaur hunt—without question, the most ambitious of my career. Among our number were Tuareg guides and drivers, a film crew, 64 armed guards, and my paleo dream team of 20 students and freshly minted professors, recruited to spend three months venturing across one of the planet's least hospitable landscapes. Our mission was to explore and excavate three distinct sites, spread across hundreds of miles of blazing, roadless desert. The fossils we found we would ship to my University of Chicago Fossil Lab for careful cleaning and study, later returning them for display in Niger, to celebrate the country's stunning ancient heritage. I had crisscrossed Niger's Sahara during 11 previous expeditions going back 32 years. The last two, in 2018 and 2019, had been for reconnaissance, and I'd spotted bone-rich pockets in some of the desert's most remote and sandswept corners, with dinosaur skeletons jutting from the desert floor. But without the team or tools to collect them, I could only log the sites and imagine our return trip. Then a global pandemic shut down the world, and I spent two years drawing up an audacious plan—and fundraising, with little success. That is, until a benefactor, requesting anonymity, agreed to fully fund the quest. My appeal had aimed at our innate human curiosity, a chance to uncover creatures from paleontology's last great frontier. (This incredibly rare burial ground reveals new secrets about the Sahara's lush, green past.) Ancient mud captured the footprint of an unknown species of sauropod. The expedition found fossils from what Sereno says are many newly identified species. Niger is a dino wonderland because of two chance geologic events. The first unfolded 180 million years ago, during the early Jurassic, when the great landmass Gondwana began to break apart, forming a massive depression in the center of what is now the West African nation, then a verdant region teeming with life. For millions of years, the depression took in sediment and the skeletons of dinosaurs and other creatures. The second event happened 20 million years ago, when a volcanic hot spot raised what's known as the Aïr Massif on the edge of this depression, tilting the strata upward and returning to the surface the now fossilized skeletons. Driving across these rock layers today, heading from Agadez into the open desert, is a journey through deep time. Our timeline was ambitious even before the delay in Agadez, and the expedition's success would hinge on benefiting from lessons I'd learned in the past, along with some novel technology we would deploy in the field. Our perseverance would be tested—many of my young colleagues had never set foot in the Sahara, worked under armed guard in 130-degree heat, or gone a month without a shower. Those with me on previous expeditions, meanwhile, had seen it all: food poisoning, malaria, sandstorms, expedition-ending breakdowns, gun-toting bandits, government coups. And yet I am always eager to go back. Gusty winds make operating drones tricky in the Sahara, but Sereno's team used aerial footage to prospect, map digs, and find campsites. Technology enabled an expedition timeline that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. No one knows the land and its secrets better than those who live on it, and our site nearest to Agadez was a return to a tantalizing find that a local Tuareg nomad had shown us. Years before, he'd led my team by motorbike into the desert, to a spot that the Tuareg call Tchinekankaran (CHIN-kan-KAR-an), or 'place of insects,' for the locusts that swarm after seasonal rains. It's a gravel rise about 10 feet high that stretches for nearly a mile and a half across the acacia-studded Irhazer Plain. Atop the little ridge, a series of large, spool-shaped vertebrae breached the surface. Some digging exposed more of the backbone, which belonged to a 50-foot-long sauropod, the classification given to long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs. (The desert communities of Algeria make a home in the Sahara sand seas.) For this expedition, my team fanned out over the rise and quickly made a series of stunning discoveries, encountering four more of these massive creatures, including one whose neck ended with the most cherished of paleo prizes: a skull. All four seemingly belonged to the same yet-unnamed species. We nicknamed it Ipod, shorthand for an Irhazer Plain sauropod. The elevated fossil field, meanwhile, became Sauropod Island. From the details of its skeleton, I suspected our Ipod dated to the middle Jurassic, some 160 million years ago. But without an ash bed to date it by, this was only a guess. Finding a seam of volcanic ash near a dig site is every paleontologist's dream, since crystals within it can contain datable radioactive isotopes. I'd had my eyes out for ash beds on previous expeditions, but like every Saharan explorer before me, I'd come up dry. This time, however, I brought along one of the world's great time tellers, MIT research scientist and isotope whiz Jahan Ramezani. Jahan's big discovery came by accident, after a rock punctured a tire on one of our battered Land Rovers not far from Sauropod Island. As a few of us set about the repair, he scrambled up the side of a nearby cliff. Soon, Jahan was calling my name, and I found him poking at a greenish clay—an indicator of ancient volcanism, to his expert eye. Would that clay contain the crystals we'd need to date our fossils? Jahan smiled at me confidently. 'I'll bet my career on this one,' he said. Finding bones at Sauropod Island was the easy part. The challenge was whether we could collect all we saw in the three weeks we could devote to the site. Most of my team doubted it was possible. Thirty years ago it likely wouldn't have been, but our tools have come a long way. Some of what we bring to the Sahara today still resembles the equipment and supplies from my first foray in 1993. We still use plaster, burlap, and wood to cocoon fossils in portable field jackets. Our Land Rovers are trusty survivors of past treks. We still get by on packets of dehydrated food—although these days, adding boiling water to a package labeled 'lasagna' yields something closer to the real deal. (They were seeking a mythical oasis in the Sahara. They found a Stone Age surprise instead.) But new gear and technologies have dramatically transformed both the speed of excavation and the imaging of fossils as they emerge. Drill breakers powered by lithium batteries have largely replaced chisels and rock hammers. Lightweight electric jackhammers have replaced picks. GPS and digital imaging technology have replaced hand-drawn maps, while drones and photogrammetry can generate 3D images in minutes, on scales that range from sprawling dig sites to individual bones. At Sauropod Island, a drone flying overhead captured the entire scene, our tracks weaving between skeletons like ant trails. I wouldn't say modern equipment makes the work easy, but it does make the job safer and more efficient. Together with good old-fashioned sweat and 15-hour days, it helped our efforts pay off. When we pulled away from Sauropod Island, triumphant and exhilarated, our trucks strained under a load of some 25 tons of fossils. National Geographic Explorer Alexandre Demers-Potvin, then a Ph.D. student, consults a site map that Sereno made by hand upon discovering this skeleton in 2018. The fossil remained covered for years, awaiting the team's return. Even more remote country awaited us at a site called Gadoufaoua, said to mean 'place where camels fear to tread.' It is Africa's most famously fossil-rich area, in the heart of the Sahara's hyperarid Ténéré region, a desert within a desert. Although I've never felt so much as a drop of rain in Gadoufaoua, my team made a fossil discovery there years ago that's a reminder of how much wetter the area once was. It wasn't a dinosaur at all but rather prehistory's largest dinosaur-eating crocodilian, Sarcosuchus. We took to calling it 'SuperCroc,' a nickname that has stuck in the media. We left from Agadez, where we deposited fossils between digs. In front of us, a roadless expanse of rock gave way to a majestic but daunting dunescape, unfolding as far as the eye or drone could see. Experienced local guides are essential in such terrain, where sinkholes of unexpectedly soft sand can mire vehicles driven by even veteran Saharan hands. Our large dump truck, loaded with 1,000-liter tanks of water, was prone to sinking. Digging it out became a familiar routine, extending what could be a single day's journey to Gadoufaoua into three. You know you've arrived at Gadoufaoua when you see the fossil bones, tinged red with iron, scattered in every direction among low rocky ridges. We were looking for species that lived alongside SuperCroc, in the early Cretaceous, some 110 million years ago. Our first target was Ouranosaurus, a 30-foot-long, sail-backed herbivore. My team had encountered one years before and had covered it, to protect it from wind erosion, until we could someday return. We found it again before long, a gorgeous row of planklike bones as tall as a human and arranged in an array, like a peacock's fantail. It was the first intact bony dinosaur sail ever discovered, and studying it will help solve the mystery of what biological purposes these protrusions served. Spanish paleontologist Noelia Sánchez Fontela peers at sediment with a loupe at a site called Gadoufaoua, where exposed rock dates to the early Cretaceous. Labels on fragments of one of a sauropod's trunk (or dorsal) ribs will aid reassembly. Prepping fossils to ship to Sereno's lab in Chicago required diligent logging and packaging. This fossilized ungual, or claw bone, once belonged to a sauropod on the Irhazer Plain. When the dinosaur was alive, in the Jurassic period, a claw as big as this fossil would have protruded from the bone. A logo on one of the team's Land Rovers dates to the first Saharan expedition that Sereno led, in 1993. Fifteen vehicles made up the caravan during the most recent Niger mission. To make up for our initial delay in Agadez, we worked deep into the night excavating Ouranosaurus, relying on generator-powered lamps. Although the work was exhausting, round-the-clock excavation has its perks in the heart of the Sahara. Nighttime temperatures plummeted to half the day's 125-degree high. Insects attracted by our bizarre desert light show retired before midnight. All told, we would pack out two tons of Ouranosaurus fossils in just three days. Gadoufaoua hides its secrets under drifting, shifting sand: You might walk right past a hidden skull one year only to spot it the next. On an earlier visit, we had discovered a patiolike stretch of exposed sandstone that was packed, to a jaw-dropping degree, with the embedded bones of raptors, turtles, fish, and more—what paleontologists call a microsite. As I returned to Gadoufaoua, among the foremost questions on my mind was whether the microsite would be buried under deep sand, and if it wasn't, how we might carve it up and collect it. I held my breath as I neared the spot and saw a towering dune. But miraculously, just yards away from it, the microsite was exposed. And soon it was surrounded by awestruck paleontologists on their hands and knees, marveling at the sandstone-bound menagerie. We used a rock saw with the largest diamond-covered blade we could find to slice down, about six inches, into the bone patio, hoping to cut it into bricks we could carry out in our usual field jackets. But would the slabs separate cleanly? When the first one did, with little more than the tap of a chisel, my team whooped. I felt like Michelangelo at first, then like Darwin aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, knowing a million bones of unknown species were ours for the collecting. Painstakingly removing rock or sediment from around fossil treasures like these might require years of lab time. But there at Gadoufaoua, one of my team members submerged a block from the microsite in water, and we discovered to our amazement that the sandstone matrix softened instantly—meaning this trove could be freed with minimal effort back at the Fossil Lab. The thrill of that realization helped power us through six long days transforming the bone patio into 10 tons of jacketed slabs. We headed to our final site with only two weeks left in the field, feeling the pressure. Three years before, we'd come to this place, some 120 miles east of Agadez, after investigating a passage I'd read in a 1950s monograph. Its author, French geologist Hugues Faure, described an isolated site where he had found saber-shaped teeth, like those of the T. rex-esque Egyptian predator Carcharodontosaurus. With some effort, we had found his site and, along with it, plenty more teeth, confirming Faure's understanding of the beds as late Cretaceous, some 95 million years old. We might have left with nothing more than teeth if not for a serendipitous visitor to our camp. He wore a black trench coat, cheche head wrap, and sunglasses, with a Tuareg sword slung over his shoulder. His name was Abdul Nasser, and he offered to take us to a bigger bone field. As he led us deep into one of the Sahara's great ergs, or sand seas, over and between dunes, our Land Rover struggled to keep pace with his Honda motorbike. It was feeling like a fool's errand until Abdul pulled up alongside a thigh bone as long as I am tall. It clearly belonged to a skeleton; in every direction, there was more bone. Grace Kinney-Broderick, then a field assistant and a former fossil preparator in Sereno's University of Chicago Fossil Lab, brushes off a sauropod tailbone while members of the team's security detail look on. Truck-mounted guns were a precaution against bandits. With little daylight and fuel, we were able only to note the GPS coordinates of the place, called Jenguebi, and grab a few jaw pieces we assumed were from Carcharodontosaurus. But assembling the jaw back in Chicago, I realized the teeth and tooth sockets were all wrong. They belonged instead to the sail-backed predator Spinosaurus. It was the first record of one of these water-loving beasts found so far inland—and I suspected it was a new species. Our return trip to Jenguebi took us back across the erg. We hopscotched among rocky areas, each smaller than the last, as we traveled deeper into it. We set up camp near where we found the jaw pieces, and we'd been there no more than an hour when my colleague Dan Vidal, a seasoned paleontologist from Spain, came running toward me, eyes gleaming. 'It's here!' he said. 'The skull!' (What dinosaur has 500 teeth? This prehistoric jaw was one-of-a-kind.) I found much of my team gathered around a toothy snout jutting up from the rock. These were the first Spinosaurus skull bones found in place in more than a century. My colleagues stood, mesmerized, as the significance of the find sank in. Some even wept. A few hours later, Dan found me again. This time he held an unfamiliar, boomerang-shaped bone. It was a head crest, we realized, but a strange one, projecting upward to a degree never seen in predatory dinosaurs. And where the crest of an Egyptian Spinosaurus is a ridge, this one was shaped like a scimitar. While team members Jahan Ramezani (at left) and Vincent Reneleau handle lunch dishes, Sereno finds a patch of elusive shade alongside the kitchen tent. On coals made from kindling, the team's Tuareg guides boiled water for tea in the evenings. Knowledgeable local guides were key to the expedition's success. While the team excavated the skull, Dan, our photogrammetry expert, documented the emerging skeleton with digital photos—a much faster process than in my early career, when we'd have photographed a few key fossils and I'd have stood over others, doing shaded drawings. That evening, on a laptop in the tent, he presented us with a 3D image, made from the stitched-together photos, of the skull of our new tall-crested Spinosaurus. The team was awestruck. It wasn't our last spectacular find at Jenguebi. A few days later, an 11-year-old boy from a Tuareg family camped nearby offered to show us fossils he'd seen while wandering with his goats. Navigating complex terrain he knew by heart, he led us to site after site, some with little more than a lonely bone fragment. At the last site, however, was an impressive set of bones and teeth. The latter's saber-like shape left no doubt we had found Africa's first partial skeleton of a carcharodontosaurid. After cleaning and assembly, it will provide the first detailed look at Africa's line of these colossal predators. We returned to Agadez haggard, dirty, and triumphant, with fossils filling two 40-foot containers. On a truck scale, the results of our efforts weighed in at 55 tons, twice what many of us had estimated. I, meanwhile, was 32 pounds lighter. I was also elated, leaving Niger for Chicago and knowing that, in a matter of months, our fossils would soon make the same trip. Then one last hurdle arose, suddenly and unexpectedly, a few months after our return. A military coup toppled the elected government of Niger, putting the shipment of the fossils on hold. (How a trip through the Sahara reflects Niger's fragile state.) Veteran fossil hunter Agali Bazo, curator of a small natural history museum in the oasis town of Ingall, visits the site that the team nicknamed Sauropod Island. For nearly two years, the fossils from our expedition remained in limbo. Then this spring, I traveled to Niamey, Niger's capital, where I signed an agreement that will at last bring the fossils to Chicago. It also provides for their staged repatriation, and it establishes a blueprint to develop two new Nigerien museums to house them, along with an institute to train the country's next generation of museologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists. These initiatives will be overseen by NigerHeritage, a foundation I established in 2016. I first came to Niger for its fossils, for high adventure, and for the stark beauty of its landscapes and sunsets. But I've returned again and again because of my deeper motivations as a paleontologist—because I know that the significance of my work isn't ultimately measured in new species but by the impact those discoveries can have on the future of a nation. On the eve of our expedition, I had goaded my young team members by telling them this would be their chance to write a new chapter in Earth's history, something they'd have few opportunities to do in a lifetime. We now have troves of images, video, and data from the field, and we have presented findings to conferences and journals, including a paper on the remarkable tall-crested Spinosaurus species. Soon we will have the bones for close study, along with geologic samples to reveal their age. Next will come an outpouring of discoveries related to the Carcharodontosaurus, a dozen new sauropods, a digging raptor, an armorless croc, a giant 'SuperFish,' and other new species. We are poised to write that chapter, introducing others to Africa's lost dinosaur worlds, daring them to imagine what still lies beneath the surface. A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. An Explorer since 1983, paleontologist Paul Sereno writes this month about the most ambitious expedition of his career. He is a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and runs the university's Fossil Lab, a research and education center.
