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 [...]
One of the techniques we use to document a site that we excavate is to get an aerial view from above and so we take advantage of the good wind we have and suspend a camera from a kite. If we sent the camera up high enough you can get a wide area in quite [...]
Last year much of a pig skeleton was recovered from a rugged and rocky hillside covered in a tumbling dark and broken slabs of sandstone including many foot bones. We revisited this site and during long rains earlier this year, more of the pig skeleton had eroded from the slope. We were able to collect [...]
The Koobi Fora Research Project is back in the field again this year.Its been busy and exciting so far so finally a few posts from the field season.With one good fossil coming out of the ground already it prompted a visit by Richard Leakey who came and watched the proceedings for a morning.We are [...]
The excavation crew have completed the first excavation after four weeks of work. They have now moved to a new site where fossil hunter Robert Moru found a hominid femur last year. From the excavation site in Area 129. Unfortunately after four weeks of excavation no additional hominid fragmends were found from this excavation. The [...]
Final week of first excavation in progress for the Koobi Fora Research Project. The field crew at the first excavation Here are some images taken by Lawrence Nzuve who is at the site of the excavation, showing the progress as they work their way up the slope. Remember they are digging with delicate picks and [...]
With the generous support of National Geographic Society Missions programs we are back to the field again. The field season started in the last week of May. It has been a very wet year in the north with lots of rain and the area is looking so green, covered in mats of flowers and long [...]
While some of the crew have been wet sieving the sediments recovered from the last field season, others have been doing specimen preparation. There are numerous large specimens, most of them in plaster that were recovered from the field over that past few years. Christopher Kiarie, an expert preparator from the National Museums of Kenya [...]
Lawrence Nzuve After the short break after the field season, some members of the crew are back to work to continue with the wet sieving. A large quantity of sediment was painstakingly carried back to the TBI Ileret field station at the end of the field season from the excavation sites. [...]
We close this season very content knowing that it has been a success. Its been exciting with several good discoveries made by several members of the field crew but as a result we spent longer on the sieves than finding new fossils. The sieving is hot work especially in the afternoons. We sit by the [...]
With the discovery, documenting and collecting of the hominin finds completed, each site now has to be seived. The crew does the preliminary sieving at the site and then the screened sediment is caried back to the car in sacks to be transported back to TBI Ileret field station. Here over the next six months [...]
The last few weeks have been busy and exciting for the crew members. What a day it was with the discovery of three hominin specimens- they were all found within hours of discovering the first one! Crew celebrates one of the hominid finds on a day three hominid specimens were discovered Abdub, who discovered [...]
Just days after discovering the first hominid of the season in area 10, John seems to have done it again.The field crew moved into a new area and it was not long before he spoted a tooth lying on the surface. Its hard to spot these fossils as you can see from the picture below, [...]
This is probably the largest fossil specimen found and collected in recent years. This is the massive skull and mandible of a crocodile, some 1.8 million years old. It appears to have its mouth tightly shut and could so easily have belonged o one of the fierce and enormous river crocodiles on the Omo River [...]
The past few weeks have been very busy for both the crew and the collection team; initially we were concentrating in Area 10. While we were there we were able to collect a large sand stone block which contained a partial hippo skull with the skull of a slender snouted crocodile- Euthecodon. These were cemented [...]
Here is a report from our first few days in the field. We started the season returning to area 10, where we were working in 2007. There were some fossils that remained to be collected there and so we took the opportunity to work the first week here as it is not far from the [...]
We have begun the field season and therefore Sunday was a busy day spent going over the modern bone collection and the hominin casts that are at the TBI field station. Francis and Meave Leakey ran an excellent refersher class for us preparing us well for finding fossils in the field. We had verious identification [...]