Hello, my name is Amelia and I am currently majoring in Anthropology through SUNY Albany in New York. This week we dove into our geology module! We started off by learning the basics of using both the Brunton compass, along with more modern technology by using a handheld GPS system linked to satellites for navigation. [...]
Paivaa/hello! Welcome to another installment of TBI’s field school blog! This weeks blog post is written by me, Onni Purhonen. I’m a biology student from the University of Helsinki in Finland, currently in my second year of studies and specializing in ecology and evolutionary biology. The current field school-module on ecology with Dr. Dino J. [...]
Personal journal excerpt: It is Tuesday evening; I am relaxing in Mpala research center reminiscing a productive day. I am inspired to write a short account of the ant-acacia relationship we learned earlier today: Picture an ant, One ferocious and alert, She tends and serves, To protect her reserves! Picture another ant, One [...]
Hello! We are the DART - OPTiK team, a collaboration of researchers from the University of Edinburgh, STFC UKRI, Technical University of Kenya and the Turkana Basin Institute. We will be working at the TBI base in Ileret for the next couple of months to set up a portable telescope which will then take observations [...]
This July, Kevin Hatala (Chatham University), Neil Roach (Harvard University) and Louise Leakey (Stony Brook University) led a TBI team unearthing a new early Pleistocene footprint site at Koobi Fora. The first tracks were discovered last year by Louise’s team at the bottom of an important skeletal fossil excavation. This year’s excavation uncovered a large [...]
On the Eastern side of Lake Turkana, the sediments reveal information about the early evolution of humankind. The sedimentary sequences tell us what it would have been like for early humans such as Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus, and early Homo species millions of years ago. However, in stark contrast to the ecosystem that was home [...]
Hi again! It’s Ava and Christine, Mechnical Engineering Undergraduate students from MIT D-Lab. After a beautiful few days spotting animals in the Masai Mara, we flew up to TBI's facility on the east side of Lake Turkana in Ileret to continue our evaporative cooling research! During our time in Ileret, we focused on understanding the [...]
Pan of the Miocene Dead Elephant Valley in Buluk, Kenya The last stop on the Turkana Miocene Project field tour was Buluk, Kenya, which has for many years been headed by Ellen Miller. Located east of Lake Turkana, Buluk is an early Miocene site that is rife with…. everything! It is a [...]