DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – The world appears to be a fearful place during this period due to the development of the Corona virus, but a recent paleontology study may help set the record straight.
A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago, it could be said that part of the Sahara Desert was the most dangerous place on the planet Earth, where large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any contemporary wild ecosystem gathered.
An analysis of fossils from the stone formation “Kamkam”, which is located in the southeast of Morocco near the Algerian border, and dates back to the Cretaceous period, the presence of large-scale carnivorous dinosaurs in a region, in addition to predatory crawlers, all living together in what was in that time River system teeming with huge fish, instead of desert.
Objects in the “kmum” area roamed the surface of the earth about 95 million years before the first humans appeared on this planet, but “if you have a time machine that can bring you back to this place, it is likely that you will not last long”, according to the lead author of the study. Nizar Ibrahim.
Ibrahim explained to CNN that the ecosystem “as a sleeve” was considered an “environmentally ambiguous place”, as typical ecosystems provide more plant-eating animals than predators, and that predators come in various sizes, with a dominant predator And bigger.
In Kamkam, the predators’ fossils outnumber those of plant-eating dinosaurs, and many predators living together in the area, such as the dinosaurs of Carcarodontosaurus and deltadromius, were as large as the Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs.
This is unusual “even for the standards of dinosaurs,” according to Ibrahim, because the species of tyrannosaurus, which was found in North America after tens of millions of years, served as “the undisputed ruler of its ancient ecosystem.”
It is unlikely that the “big sleeve” predators ate each other. For Ibrahim, the most realistic theory is that it fed on the abundant fish found in the area, and the sawfish that could reach 25 feet in length.
Ibrahim’s study of the “Kamkum” region with a group of international researchers across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Africa draws attention to the importance of learning more about paleontology in Africa, among other regions in the southern hemisphere.
The forgotten continent
Ibrahim said, “Africa remains, in many ways, a forgotten continent in paleontology, and this study deals with this.”
Although the accessibility and degree of preservation of evidence differ on the African continent, there is still much to discover in Africa.
The Kamkam study shows that African ecosystems “do not simply repeat the ones we know in North America, Europe or other known places,” and they also reveal evidence of what happens to life when major changes in climate occur.
Evidence shows in the layers of rocks, in the formation of the “Kamkum” stone, that the river system, where predators and large fish originated, eventually became submerged in sea water, which turned the region into a shallow sea, and today this same region is located in the largest hot desert in the world.
Ibrahim indicated that paleontology can help us understand “the long-term consequences of biodiversity loss, which we are witnessing at the moment.”
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