A stretch of the Ténéré desert in Niger that has produced some of the strangest animals of the Cretaceous. Out of these beds have come the sauropod Nigersaurus taqueti, the sail-backed Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, Lurdosaurus, and the fish-eating theropods Suchomimus tenerensis and Cristatusaurus. The headline is Sarcosuchus imperator, SuperCroc, which Paul Sereno recovered in 1997: vertebrae, limb bones, armour plates, jaws and a nearly complete skull six feet long. READ ONLY. This is an active research site in a remote and difficult part of the Sahara, not a collecting locality, and taking fossils out of Niger is not a thing to attempt. It is here because it is one of the great fossil grounds of the world and worth knowing about.
Sarcosuchus, Nigersaurus, Ouranosaurus, Suchomimus · Early Cretaceous, 125-112 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Niger
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