Middle Eocene

During July and August, 2000, field work was aimed at collection of plant and vertebrate fossils from crater-lake deposits in north-central Tanzania. The deposits are dated at approximately 46 Ma, a time period previously undocumented by fossils in tropical Africa, and they provide information about fauna, flora, and climate for the first time.

Team members split rock from the Mahenge fossil quarry.

About 260 plant specimens, several fossil fish and a fossil bat new to science were collected. Plant fossils are dominated by the bean family (Herendeen and Jacobs, 2000), providing information about the evolutionary history of that family, and leaf morphology of the total assemblage will provide the first quantitative reconstruction for climate in Africa during the globally warm early Cenozoic.

CLICK HERE for more background and daily journal entries from the 2000 field trip.