Out of Africa come fascinating fossils

With the breakup came the beginnings of regional variations in species among creatures in the northern and southern segments. Now, researchers in Africa are using Cretaceous creatures to help document the biological and ecological effects of further splitting as the southern segment, known as Gondwanaland, began to break apart.

Large animals are particularly good markers for continental drift, because they are less likely to "raft" their way on fallen trees or other vegetation over oceans thousands of miles wide to new shores, Sues says.

In 1997, for example, Dr. Krause and colleagues from India described finding the same fossil mammals from the late Cretaceous period in Madagascar and India, providing what the team calls the first evidence of a growing "cosmopolitansim" among Gondwanaland mammals from that period. The only other travelers from Gondwanaland had been seen in South America, another cast-off from the larger land mass.

As they work their sites and study the lessons fossils have to teach, several paleontologists also are working to erase the legacy of Indiana Jones-style approaches to collecting fossil specimens.

The shift is driven in no small part by increasingly tight restrictions host countries have placed on shipping evidence of Africa's prehistory heritage to other parts of the world.

In some cases, expedition leaders are looking for local students who have an aptitude for the work, inviting them to come to Western universities for graduate degrees, and then watching as they return to take up the work at home on their own.

"If you can take a person and train them to perform at an international level and they go back, those people will be leaders in their countries - they have abilities and knowledge that that country can use," says Louis Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and director of the university's Shuler Museum of Paleontology.

He has focused his own efforts on Malawi and the hunt for Cretaceous mammals.

Under his tutelage, a Malawian graduate student earned her PhD and returned home to take over work at the sites Jacobs had begun studying there. He and his team trained others to properly care for and display the fossils.

He notes, "Our group from the outset said, 'We're not going to practice scientific colonialism.'"

In other cases, expedition leaders are initiating small-scale aid projects.

In what Jacobs calls a model, SUNY's Krause has established a foundation that has endowed a school and teacher for the village in Madagascar near his team's excavation site.

The group also has sunk a well for the village, to provide clean water.

"We often had kids visit the site in the middle of the day. We had a great time showing them the site, but we wondered why they weren't in school like they should be," says Dr. Forster, who works with Krause. "They didn't have one."

"We thought the best thing we could to to thank these people for letting us come into their community every summer and dig holes in their landscape is at least to hire a teacher," she says.

As efforts to uncover Africa's fossilized flora and fauna expand, researchers note the universal interest in dinosaurs.

"People in Malawi are just as interested in dinosaurs as people in the United States are," Dr. Jacobs says.

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