100 million years ago, ferocious predators, including
flying reptiles and crocodile-like creatures
, made the Sahara the most dangerous place on Earth, according to the largest review in nearly 100 years of fossil vertebrates from an area of rock formations. from the Cretaceous, in southeastern Morocco, known as the Kem Kem Group.
The review, published in 2020 in the journal
ZooKeys,
"provides a window into Africa's era of dinosaurs," 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 of Detroit. University of 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
.
Fossils from the Kem Kem Group include three of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever known, including the saber-toothed Carcharodontosaurus (
more than 8 meters in length
with enormous jaws and long, serrated teeth up to 20 centimeters long) and Deltadromeus (about 8 meters long, a member of the raptor family with long and unusually thin hind limbs for its size), as well as various
predatory flying reptiles
(pterosaurs) and crocodile 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
."
Fish was the favorite food of predators
Many of the predators depended 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 enormous
fish , including giant coelacanths and lungfish. The coelacanth, for example, is probably four or even five times bigger than today's coelacanth. There is a huge
water
sawshark
sweet called Onchopristis with the most fearsome of rostral teeth, they are like
barbed daggers
, but beautifully shiny."
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 this first Fully illustrated detailed report of the fossil-rich escarpment, formerly known as the "Kem Kem Beds".
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 sets of fossil data and images, which were originally included in his PhD thesis, Dr Ibrahim visited Kem Kem collections on
several continents.
Shedding light on Africa's ancient past is important, says Professor Martill: "This is the most comprehensive work on fossil vertebrates from the Sahara in almost a century, since the famous German palaeontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach published his last major work
in 1936"
.
Europe Press.
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