Evolution of Large Flightless Birds

Looking at the current distribution of ratites (large flightless birds including ostriches, rheas, emus and cassowaries) and understanding t...

The Chad Basin

The Chad Basin is both a topographic and a geologic sedimentary basin that covers nearly 8% of the African Continent, stretching from southe...

The Dead Sea Transform

The Dead Sea Transform marks the western edge of the Arabian Plate, extending from the East Anatolian Fault (in southeastern Turkey) to the ...

Africa's Aquatic Dinosaur

Last evening, NOVA , on PBS, focused on the discovery and evaluation of Spinosaurus fossils, the largest carnivorous dinosaur yet unearthed ...

Sorghum Season

Driving across the Great Plains today, I noticed that sorghum covered most of the crop fields, especially in central Kansas.  Native to nort...

The Nature of Ebola

Ebola is a filamentous, RNA virus; of the five known species, four cause disease in humans.  Fruit bats appear to be the natural host (carri...

Formation of the Indian Ocean

About 200 million years ago (MYA), the Tethys Sea split Pangea into Laurasia (the northern continents) and Gondwanaland (the southern contin...

The Congo River

Almost 3000 miles long and second only to the Amazon in its annual flow volume, the Congo River curves counterclockwise through the Democrat...

Madagascar's Cyclone Season

Madagascar, the fourth largest island on Earth, lies off the southeast coast of Africa, in the western Indian Ocean. Oriented northeast to ...

A New Canary Island

The Canary Islands are a volcanic island chain off the northwest coast of Africa. Current geologic evidence suggests that this Spanish arch...

The Albertine Rift

The East African Rift is the southern end of a rift system that extends from the Jordan Valley of the Middle East to the coast of Mozambique...

Wall Street & Somalia

Tuning into the PBS News Hour last evening, one of the few television shows of any value, I watched two stories that highlighted the vast an...

Hominids & the Sahara Desert

The vast Sahara Desert, which stretches across North Africa, began to form in the late Miocene and early Pliocene, some 10 million years ago...

The Falklands & South Africa

When geologists first explored the Falkland Islands, 250 miles off the coast of southern Argentina, they found rock strata that did not corr...

Chiseling the African Plate

During the Permian Period, some 250 million years ago (MYA), future Africa was encased within the combined land mass of Pangea. Then, about...

Madagascar and its Primates

As Pangea continued to break apart, Madagascar split from Africa, some 160 million years ago. Drifting to the south, it merged with the rem...

The Baobab Spark

There are moments in our life when we suddenly see our world in a different light, when our perspective changes and our life takes a new cou...

Primates

Primates, the mammalian family of which we are a member, first appeared at the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, some 65 million years ago. Wit...

The Rift Valley

The Rift Valley of East Africa is the southern end of a 4000 mile rift that begins in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon and extends southward thro...

Italy and Africa

During the Permian Period, 250 million years ago, the continents merged into a single land mass, known as Pangea. Fifty million years later...