Close to completing their course on the modern ecology of the Turkana Basin, students hiked to an old growth tree grove adjacent to the Turkwel River. The grove, with a massive tamarind at its center supporting orchids and monkeys, is a local site of gatherings and ceremonies, and considered holy by some. Following their exam [...]
TBI's Ecology course kept Field School students busy from sunrise until sunset and beyond, as Dino Martins led students on birdwalks, collecting expeditions and late night hunts for scorpions. The landscape around TBI is filled with a fascinating array of East African birds, amphibians, and insects, all of whom took advantage of the [...]
Sweat is an abundant liquid around this neighborhood. TBI students and staff give out perhaps gallons of this stuff daily. On some Sundays we all go for a swim in lake Turkana at Eliye -a nice spot where a natural fresh water spring trickles into the saline jade sea. Last Sunday, after swimming in the [...]
Turkana Basin Institute students, faculty and staff were astonished on Wednesday when a vigorous windstorm gave way to rain. The whole ecosystem of the Turkana desert, from the smallest insects and algae to the fish, birds and great acacias depend upon annual rains. A drought has devastated the region for over 2 years now, and [...]
Dino Martins arrived at TBI over the weekend and, on Monday, began teaching a weeklong course on the ecology the the Turkana lake basin. Like much of East Africa, Turkana has been heavily affected by ecological disturbances caused by climate change and human land use patterns. To contribute to a scientific understanding of these changes, [...]
On Saturday, TBI students concluded their 2 week-long intensive course on human evolution by honoring the memory of Charles Darwin, exactly 202 years after his birth. The field of evolutionary biology has never advanced so quickly, nor been so integrated in modern and biomedical sciences as it is today. Nevertheless Darwin and his ideas remain [...]
Three decades ago a vacationing couple, while walking along the west shore of Lake Turkana, saw the back end of a human skull protruding from the sand. The cranium, or upper portion of the skull, was darkly stained and heavy from the process of fossilization, which over time had filled it with additional minerals. A [...]
TBI Field School Students began a study of fossil preparation on Tuesday, in an effort to better understand the process by which fossil remains are made ready for scientific analysis.We are accustomed to seeing pictures of beautifully preserved fossil crania on the covers of Science, Nature or National Geographic. Most fossils are not found intact [...]