A Carcharodontosaurus eyes a group of crocodile-like hunters called Elosuchus. (Davide Bonadonna)
Nature's Science Alert has a story about the Kem Kem Group in eastern Morocco. Due to the shear number of large-bodied carnivores, abelisaurs, Spinosaurs aegyptiacus, Carcharodontonsaurus saharicus, Deltadromeus agilis, and several large crocodyiforms, it's hard to imagine how one would avoid being eaten! The seeming overabundance of predatory versus herbivorous dinosaurs has become known as "Stromer's riddle". Ernest Stromer was the discoverer of Spinosaurus in the 1920s.
Read all the details in a paper published in the journal ZooKeys.
In a new study, Ibrahim and his team reviewed the abundance of fossil evidence sourced from what has previously been termed the 'Kem Kem beds' – a fossil-rich deposit of ancient strata situated near the Moroccan-Algerian border and dating back to the Late Cretaceous period.
The site's existence has long been known, and not only to palaeontologists, but also to commercial fossil hunters, meaning the plundered remains of many of these ancient dinosaurs, reptiles, and other creatures are now scattered far and wide across the globe in private collections.
That distribution of isolated fossils means we've been missing out on a consolidated overview of what the Kem Kem Group's fossil haul truly represents; something Ibrahim and fellow researchers have attempted to rectify with their new analysis, which involved visits being made to collections held on several continents.
"This is the most comprehensive piece of work on fossil vertebrates from the Sahara in almost a century, since the famous German palaeontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach published his last major work in 1936," explains one of the team, palaeobiologist David Martill from the University of Portsmouth in the UK.
The review provides "a window into Africa's age of dinosaurs", Ibrahim says, and suggests the Kem Kem Group actually encompasses two distinct fossil-rich sites, called the lower Gara Sbaa and upper Douira formations.
Both formations exhibit a range of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, in addition to ancient crocodyliforms, turtles, fish remains, plus various invertebrate, plant, and trace fossils.
