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January 11, 2007

Niger treasure: Burke curator unpacks fossils that will aid his research on life forms of distant past

Mary Levin
Some of the several hundred pounds worth of fossils that Christian Sidor and the scientists on his team brought back from Niger lie on a table at the Burke Museum. After preparation, the original fossils will be returned to Niger and the Burke will keep research-quality replicas.

photo courtesy of the Burke museum
Undergraduate student Tara Smiley works at the dig in Niger. Smiley is a senior majoring in biology and Earth and space sciences.

photo courtesy of the Burke museum
Christian Sidor is seen in Africa alongside one of the larger pieces the group brought back — the nearly complete backbone of a reptile called pareiasaur. The bone is wrapped in plaster to protect it on the trip to Seattle.

Mary Levin
Sidor holds one of the fossils that was collected on his last trip to Niger. The fossil fragments on the table will need to be prepared and put together as was the piece in his hand, a process which will take months, Sidor says.

Paleontologist Christian Sidor is unwrapping 260 million-year-old fossils with the same enthusiasm as a kid under a Christmas tree. Last month he returned from a month of field research in Africa’s most underdeveloped country, Niger, and brought several hundred pounds of fossils to the UW, where he is assistant professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum.

All of the fossils collected are Late Permian in age (approximately 260 million years old, or about 40 million years before the first dinosaurs). Among the fossils found were:


  • The nearly complete backbone of a new, large, plant-eating reptile called a pareiasaur.
  • The skeleton of a small, new reptile called a captorhinid.
  • The lower jaw of the large captorhinid reptile Moradisaurus (a fossil named by French paleontologists in 1967).
  • The first plant fossils from the Upper Permian of Niger.
  • A 60-foot fossil log, the first of this size from the Permian of West Africa.
  • The first fossil footprints and trackways of land-living animals from the Permian of West Africa.

These fossils will take months to fully extract from the surrounding rock, so all identifications are tentative.

The fieldwork was conducted in north-central Niger, just to the west of the Aïr Mountains and along the southern border of the Sahara Desert. The nearest town was the uranium mining city of Arlit. All of the fossils collected remain the property of Niger and will be returned to the Museé National du Niger once the research has been completed. The Burke Museum will retain a permanent collection of research-quality replicas, the only such collection in the world.

The goal of the expedition was to investigate the relationship between climate and the distribution of animal and plant life in the distant past. The eight-person team searched for evidence of what lived in the area during the Permian, and what the rocks can tell us about the prevailing temperature and rainfall at that time.

“Back in the Permian period, when all of the continents were coalesced into the supercontinent Pangea, tetrapods (four-legged animals), from as far away as South Africa and Russia, look pretty similar to one another,” Sidor said. “But then we found these fossils in Niger in 2003 that look like nothing else — they seem to represent exclusively native (endemic) animals. How these amphibians and reptiles could be unique, but still living on the same supercontinent, is the major question driving the project.”

With days running out in the expedition, Sidor and his team discovered a reptile graveyard that proved too extensive for them to complete excavations. “Unfortunately, we had to re-bury the site because it was just getting too big. The bones just kept appearing, one after another. I think we could go back and work there for two weeks, no problem,” said Sidor.

Sidor’s grant from the National Science Foundation will allow the team to return in 2008 to complete their excavations and conduct further explorations of the barren, rocky region.

Sidor describes the 2006 expedition as among the easiest he has led. “It was amazing — we arrived and the permits were waiting for us,” he said. It doesn’t hurt that this is the fourth time he’s traveled to Niger. In 2003, he led a similar expedition based on a grant from the National Geographic Society, and in 2000 and 1997 he journeyed to Niger to help dig dinosaurs while still a graduate student at the University of Chicago.