Submitted by Garry Shaw on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 17:14
Driving through the desert in search of whales sounds counterproductive, but I had been assured that if I hired a jeep and drove seventy kilometres from Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis out into the Sahara this is indeed what I would find. If this was a ruse it was a clever one, and UNESCO were in on it.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Fri, 11/20/2009 - 15:06
A top paleontologist has discovered the remains of five ancient crocodile species in the Sahara desert. Paul Sereno, National Geographic's resident expert in the field, has dubbed the suite of SuperCrocs after the characteristics they share with other modern animals. The group, found on a windswept stretch of rock and dunes, are proof of an obscure era when the crocs roamed the southern land mass of Gondwana, some 100 million years ago.
The most spectacular of the five is SuperCroc itself, weighing in at a whopping 8 tons, and measuring over 40 feet. Four of the five had 'upright' legs which stretched out below them, rather than those of today's species which come out from the side. The list includes such oddities as DuckCroc and the flat-faced PancakeCroc.
The oasis town of Ghadames is situated on the western Libyan border with Tunisia and Algeria, about 550 km south west of Tripoli.
Although there is evidence of human occupation during Paleolithic and Neolithic times, during the Roman occupation of North Africa, Gadames was a stop-over point in the desert for Rome's army and was known as Cydamus or Cydaus. The Romans first settled there in 19 BC and during the fourth and fifth centuries it became an episcopate under the Byzantine empire and four bishops served there.
These days it is home to about 20,000 inhabitants, many of them Touareg Berbers. The ancient part of the town is a Unesco World Heritage site but this was abandoned by inhabitants in 1986 in favour of new buildings a short distance away. However, the tunnel-like streets of the old town provide shelter from the heat and the inhabitants often return during summer.
The prehistoric rock paintings of Tassili n'Ajjer in the Sahara desert in Algeria, probably date from 9000 BC on. They were made during a period when the climate was wetter than now and the Sahara was closer to savannah than desert conditions, and therefore able to support greater human occupation as is evident from finds of stone tools and ancient rubbish heaps as well as the rock art itself.
The rock art can be classified into the following periods: the Bubalus period (from c.9000 BC), the Roundhead period (c.6000-4000 BC), the Bovidian period, the Horse period (from c.1200 BC) and the Camel period. Art from the earlier periods mainly shows wild fauna including elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses and the bubalus antiqus, a now-extinct ancestor of modern cattle. From the Bovidian period on, herds of modern cattle feature heavily, along with depictions of people going about daily tasks. Horses were introduced to the Sahara in c.1200 BC and are shown in rock art until the climate became drier and camels replaced horses as the beast of burden.
Driving through the desert in search of whales sounds counterproductive, but I had been assured that if I hired a jeep and drove seventy kilometres from Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis out into the Sahara this is indeed what I would find. If this was a ruse it was a clever one, and UNESCO were in on it.
A top paleontologist has discovered the remains of five ancient crocodile species in the Sahara desert. Paul Sereno, National Geographic's resident expert in the field, has dubbed the suite of SuperCrocs after the characteristics they share with other modern animals. The group, found on a windswept stretch of rock and dunes, are proof of an obscure era when the crocs roamed the southern land mass of Gondwana, some 100 million years ago.
