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from the Sahara Desert by Paul Serno. Millions of years ago, what's now North Africa was a lush landscape teeming with an incredible variety of life. To reveal more about the mysteries of this lost age, paleontologist Paul Serino mounted perhaps the boldest dinosaur hunt ever attempted. As the Saharan sun rose on my wayland waylaid team one morning in September twenty twenty two, it seemed to burn with particular intensity.

For nearly three weeks. We'd been holed up in a mud walled compound in the oasis town of Agadez in central Nizier, stalled because of officials insistence on assembling for us a large armed escort. Now as dawn broke, we were finally ready to embark. Nearly one hundred people packed into fifteen vehicles, a motley caravan of SUVs, pickups, and one large dump truck, all strapped with sand, ladders and spare tires, heading out on an extraordinary desert dinosaur hunt,

without question the most ambitious of my career. Among our number were tareg guides and drivers, a film crew, sixty four armed guards, and my paleo dream team of twenty students and freshly minted professors recruited to spend three months venturing across one of the planet's least hospitable landscapes. Our mission was to explore and excavate three d distinct sites

spread across hundreds of miles of blazing roadless desert. The fossils we found we would ship to my University of Chicago fossil Lab for careful cleaning and study, later returning them for display in Niger to celebrate the country's stunning ancient heritage. I had crisscrossed Nizier's Sahara during eleven previous

expeditions going back thirty two years. The last two in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, had been for reconnaissance, and I'd spotted bone rich pockets in some of the desert's most remote and win sand swept corners with dinosaur skeletons jutting from the desert floor, But without the team or tools to collect them, I could only log the sites and imagine our return trip. Then a global pandemic shut down the world, and I spent two years drawing up

an audacious plan and fundraising with little success. That is until a benefactor requesting anonymity agreed to fully fund the quest. My appeal had aimed at our innate human curiosity, a chance to uncover creatures from paleontologies. Last Great Frontier Nijera is a dno wonderland because of two chance geologic events.

The first unfolded one hundred and eighty million years ago during the early Jurassic, when the great land mass Gondwana began to break apart, forming a massive depression in the center of what is now the West African nation, then a verdant region teeming with life for millions of years. The depression took in sediment and the skeletons of dinosaurs

and other creatures. The second event happened twenty million years ago, when a volcanic hotspot raised what's known as the ear massif on the edge of this depression, tilting the strata upward and returning to the surface the now fossilized skeletons. Driving across these rock layers today, heading from Agadez into

the open desert is a through deep time. Our timeline was ambitious even before the delay in Agadez, and the expedition's success would hinge on benefiting from lessons I'd learned in the past, along with some novel technology we would deploy in the field. Our perseverance would be tested many if my young colleagues had never set foot in the Sahira, worked under armed guard in one hundred thirty degree heat,

or gone a month without a shower. Those with me on previous expeditions, meanwhile, had seen it all, food poisoning, malaria, sandstorms, expedition ending breakdowns, gun toting bandits, government coups, and yet I am always eager to go back. No one knows the land and its secrets better than those who live on it, and our nearest, our site, nearest to Agadez was a return to a tantalizing find that a local

Tareg Nomad had shown us years before. He'd let my team by motorbike in to the desert to a spot that the Tuareg called chichikan Karan, or place of Insects for the locusts that swarm after seasonal rains. It's a gravel rise about ten feet high that stretches for nearly a mile and a half across the acacia studded ir Haser plane. Atop the little ridge, a series of large,

spool shaped vertebrae breached the surface. Some digging exposed more of the backbone, which belonged to a fifty foot long sauropod, the classification given to long necked plant eating dinosaurs. For this expedition, my team fanned out over the rise and quickly made a series of stunning discoveries, encountering four more of these massive creatures, including one whose neck ended with the most cherished of paleoprizes, a skull. All four seemingly

belonged to the same, yet unnamed species. We nicknamed it iPod shorthand for an ir Haser Plane sauropod. The elevated fossil field meanwhile became Sauropod Island from the details of its skeleton. I suspected our iPod dated to the Middle Jurassic, some one hundred sixty million years ago, but without an ash bed to date it by this was only a guest. Finding a seam of volcanic ash near a dig site is every paleontologist dream since crystals with it within it

can contained datable radioactive isotopes. I'd had my eyes out for ashbeds on previous expeditions, but like every Saherin explorer before me, I'd come up dry. This time, however, I brought along one of the world's great time tellers, MIT research scientists and isotope whiz Yihan Rameizani. Yihan's big discovery came by accident. After a rock punctured attire on one of our battered land rovers not far from Sauropod Island. As a few of us set about the here, he

scrambled up the side of a nearby cliff. Soon Jahan was calling my name, and I found him poking at a greenish clay, an indicator of ancient volcanism to his expert eye. Would that clay contain the crystals we'd need to date our fossils? Jahan smiled at me. Confidently, I'll bet my career on this one, he said. Finding bones at Sauropot Island was the easy part. The challenge was whether we could collect all we saw in the three weeks we could devote to the site. Most of my

team doubted it was possible. Thirty years ago it likely wouldn't have been, but our tools have come a long way. Some of what we bring to the Sahara today still resembles the equipment and supplies from my first fory in nineteen ninety three. We still use plaster, burr, lap and wood to cocoon fossils in portable field jackets. Our land

rovers are trusty survivors of pass trucks. We still get by on packets of dehydrated food, although these days adding boiling water to a package labeled basagna yields something closer to the raw deal. But new gear and technologies have dramatically transformed both the speed of excavation and the imaging of fossils as they emerge. Drill breakers powered by lithium

batteries have largely replaced chisels and rock hammers. Lightweight electric jackhammers have replaced picks, GPS and digital imaging technology have replaced hand drawn maps, while drones and photogrammetry can generate three D images in minutes on scales that range from sprawling dig sites to individual bones. At Sauropod Island, a drone flying overhead captured the entire scene, our tracks weaving

between skeletons like ant trails. I wouldn't say modern equipment marks makes the work easy, but it does make the job safer and more efficient. Together with gold, good old fashioned sweat and fifteen hour days, it helped our efforts pay off. When we pulled away from Saarpot Island triumphant and exhilarated, our trucks strained under a load of some twenty five tons of fossils. Even more remote country awaited us at a site called god Dubufara said to me,

in place where camel's fear to tread. It is Africa's most famously fossil rich area, in the heart of the Sahara's hyparidide Tenerai region, a desert within a desert. Although I've never felt so much as a drop of rain. In Gaudo Fauona, my team made a fossil discovery three there years Ago. That's a reminder of how much wetter the area once was. It wasn't a dinosaur at all,

but rather prehistory's largest dino, dinosaur eating Crocodilian Sarkuskus. We took to calling it supercroc, a nickname that has stuck in the media. We left from Agades, where we deposited fossil between digs in front of us. A roadless expanse of rock gave way to a majestic but daunting dunescape, unfolding as far as the eye or drone could see. Experienced local guides are essential in such terrain, where sinkholes of unexpectedly soft sand can myer vehicles driven by even

veteran Saharan cans. Our large dump truck loaded with one thousand liter tanks of water was prone to sinking. Digging it out became a familiar routine, extending what could be a single day's journey to Guadofaula, Faula into three. You know you've arrived at Gaudofaula when you see the fossil bones tinged red with irons, scattered in every direction among low rocky ridges. We were looking for species that lived alongside supercroc in the early Cretaceous, some one hundred ten

million years ago. Our first tacket target was Auranosaurus, a thirty foot long sail backed herbival My team had encountered one year's had encountered one years before, and had covered it to protect it from wind erosion until we could someday return. We found it again before long, a gorgeous row of plank like bones, as tall as a human

and arranged in an array like a peacock's fantail. It was the first intact bony dinosaur sale ever discovered, and studying it will help solve the mystery of what biological purposes These protrusions served to make up for our initial delay. In Agadez, we worked deep into the night excavating Aurhonosaurus, relying on generated powered lamps. Although the work was exhausting around the clock, accavation has its perks. In the heart of the Sahara, nighttime temperatures plummeted to half the day's

one hundred twenty five degree high. Insects attracted by our bizarre desert light show retired before midnight. All told, we would pack out two duns two tons of Rhanosaurus fossils in just three days. Guaudaphoya hides its secrets under drifting, shifting sand. You might walk right past a hidden skull

one year, only to spot it the next. On an earlier visit, we had discovered a petio like stretch of exposed sandstone that was packed to a jaw dropping degree with the embedded bones of raptors, turtles, fish, and more, what palaeontologists call a microsite. As I returned to Gaudaphoya, among the foremost questions on my mind was whether the microsite would be buried under deep sand, and if it wasn't,

how we might carve it up and collect it. I held my breath as I neared the spot and saw a towering dune, but miraculously, just yards away from it, the microsite was exposed, and soon it was surrounded by awestruck palaeontologus on their hands and knees marveling at the sandstone bound menagerie. We used a rock saw with the largest diamond covered blade we could find to slice down about six inches into the bone patio, hoping to cut it into bricks we could carry out in our usual

field jackets. But would the slabs separate cleanly. When the first one did with little more than a tap of a chisel, my team whooped. I felt like mclindlow at first, then like Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle, knowing a million

bones of unknown species were ours for the collecting. Painstakingly removing rock or sediment from around fossil treasures like these might require years of lab time, But there at Glaudifhoya, one of my team members submerged a block from the microsite in water, and we discovered, to our amazement that the sandstone matrix softened instantly, meaning this trove could be

freed with minimal effort. Back at the fossil lab, the thrill of that realization helped power through six long days transforming the bone patio into ten tons of jacketed slabs. We headed to our final site with only two weeks left in the field, feeling the pressure. Three years before, we'd come to this place, some one hundred and twenty miles east of Agadez, after investigating a passage i'd read

in a nineteen fifties monograph. Its author, French geologist Hugh Forrey, described an isolated site where he had found saber shaped teeth like those of the t rex esque Egyptian predator Carco Dandosaurus. With some effort, we had found this site, and along with it plenty more teeth, confirming Forre's understanding of the beds as Late Cretaceous, some ninety five million years old. We might have left with nothing more than teeth if not for a serendipitous visitor to our camp.

He wore a black trench coat, shesh head wrap, and some glasses, with a Tauregg's sword slung over his shoulder. His name was Abdul Nassar, and he offered to take us to a bigger bone field. As he led us deep into one of the Sahara's great ergs or land seas, over and between dunes, our land rover struggled to keep pace with his Honda motorbike. He was feeling like a fool's errand until Abdul pulled up alongside a thigh bone. As long as I am tall, it clearly belonged to

a skeleton. In every direction there was more bone. With little daylight and fuel, we were able only to note the GPS coordinates of the place called Jangwaibi and grab a few jaw pieces we assumed were from Carcarodontosaurus. But assembling the jaw back in Chicago, I realized the teeth and tooth sockets were all wrong. They belonged instead to the sail backed predator Spinosaurus, who was the first record of one of these water loving beasts found so far inland,

and I suspected it was a news species. Our return trip to janguwebe took us back across the airG We have scutched among rocky areas, each smaller than the last as we traveled deeper into it. We set up camp near where we found the jaw pieces, and we've been there no more than an hour. My colleague Don Vidal, a seasoned paleontologist from Spain, came running toward me, eyes gleaming. It's here, he said the skull I found. Much of my team gathered around a toothy snout jutting up from

the rock. These were the first Spinosaurus skull bones found in place in more than a century. My colleagues stood mesmerized as the significance of the find sank in. Some even wept. A few hours later, Dan found me again. This time he held an unfamiliar boomerang shaped bone. It was a head crest, we realized, but a strange one, projecting upward to agree degree never seen in predatory dinosaurs, and where the crest of an Egyptian spinosaurus is a ridge,

this one was shaped like a scimitar. While the team excavated the skull, dan our Photogramma Gramma tree expert documented the emerging skeleton with digital photos, a much faster process than in my early career, when we'd have photographed a few Kissa fossils and I'd have stood over others doing shaded drawings. That evening on a laptop in the tent, he presented us with a three D image made from the stitch together photos of the skull of our new

tall crested spinosaurus. The team was awestruck. It wasn't our last spectacular find at Janguebi. A few days later, an eleven year old boy from a Taurang family camped nearby offered to show us fossils he'd seen while wandering with his goats, navigating complex terrain he knew by heart. He led us to sight after sight, some with little more than a lonely bone fragment at the last sight, however,

was an impressive set of bones and teeth. The latter's saber like shape left no doubt we had found Africa's first partial skeleton of a cocorad dondas suide. After cleaning an assembly, it will provide the first detailed look at Africa's line of these colossal predators. We returned to Agadez haggard, dirty and triumphant, with fossils, filling two forty foot containers on a truck scale. The results of our efforts weighed in at fifty five tons, twice what many of us

had estimated. I meanwhile, was thirty two pounds later. I was also elated leaving Nigier for Chicago and knowing that in a matter of months our fossils would soon make the same trip. Then one last hurdle arose suddenly and unexpectedly. A few months after our return, a military coup toppled the elected government of Nijier, putting this shipment of the fossils on hold for nearly two years. The fossils from

our expedition remained in Limbo. Then this spring I traveled to Niame, Nizier's capital, where I signed an agreement that will at last bring the fossils to Chicago. It also provides for their staged repatriation, and it establishes a blueprint to develop two new Nigerian museums to house them, along with an institute to train the country's next generation of musiologists, archaeologists, and palaeontologists. These initiatives will be overseen by Nizier Heritage,

a foundation I established in twenty sixteen. I first came to Nigier for its fossils, for high adventure, and for the stark beauty of its landscape and sunsets. But I've returned again and again because of my deeper motivations as a paleontologist, because I know that the significance of my work isn't ultimately measured in new species, but by the impact those discoveries can have on the future of a nation.

On the eve of our expedition, I had goaded my young team members by telling them this would be their chance to write a new chapter in Earth's history, something they'd have few opportunities to do in a lifetime. We now have troves of images, video and data from the field, and we have presented findings to conferences and journals, including a paper on the remarkable tall crusted Spinosaurus species. Soon we will have the bones for close study, along with

geologic samples to reveal their age. Next will come an outpouring of discoveries related to the Carcarondontosaurus, a dozen nusauropods, a digging raptor, an armorless croc, a giant superfish, and other new species. We are poised to write that chapter introducing others to Africa's lost dinosaur worlds, daring them to

imagine what still lies beneath the surface. Next, at work with the Gorilla Ballowness of South Korea by Paul Salapek, inside a covert operation to launch a ormous balloons carrying pantyhose and nature films at North Korea. Do you know how to run fast? Asked a man I'll call Park. He was driving us carefully through dusk, well below the speed limit from Soul toward the infamously militarized zone, the

heavily mined frontier between South and North Korea. It was a warm summer evening, Park, a North Korean defector who allowed me to tag along provided he could use an assume name was keeping a wary eye on his rear real mirror for a police tail. The only vehicle shadowing us, thankful, Thankfully, was a nondescript pickup truck steered by one of Park's helpers. It was lugging under a blue tarp enough steel canisters

of hydrogen to blow up a large house. Park's two vehicle convoy wasn't bound for some mission of terror, instead trundling past seven eleven convenience stores, rural churches topped with red neon crosses, and pig farms. He and his band of four activists we're on a bizarre mission of political resistance, one that few, if any outside journalists had witnessed before. The clandestine lot clandestine lofting of huge hand made balloons

into the night skies above North Korea. Over the past twelve years, I've hiked thousands of miles across the world for a national geographic story telling project called the Out of Eden Walk. Typically, I spend my days peering down at my plotting feet to night, my attention would be focussed up on a group of improvised air strips airships floating north unfavorable summer winds carrying a payload of items that are either subversive or in short supply in the

most shuddered society on Earth. The South Korean police might pull us over. Park warned. If that happened, he advised with a wink, I should bolt into the scrub. I've been fined before, but I don't care, he said. People in the North don't even know what human rights are. Our balloons help wake them up. Hours later, parked in a weedy field near the d MZ, I watched as the guerrilla aeronauts bustled about the dark in head lamps,

cranking open the hydrogen cylinders to inflate their balloons. Gas jetted from the tank valves with a startlingly loud hiss. The airships, loaded with items like biblical tracks, U S dollar bills, pro democracy leaflets, rice, and women's hygiene products, did not resemble the colorful vessels at hot air balloon festivals. Rather, there they were elongated, clear plastic mammoths, enlarging two heights

of four or five stories tall. Soon, twenty five balloons jutted into the moonlit sky like monumental exclamation points that were surely visible for a mile. Perhaps I remember the media reports from South Korea. Last summer, thousands of large balloons hauling plastic sacks bulging with cigarette butts, rotting clothes, worms, and even feces floated from North Korea into the air space of democratic South Korea. This barrage of garbage triggered

health alert's fires and aborted flights at airports. One bag of gunk landed near the South Korean President's office in Seoul. The press often covered this armada of inflatables with a smirk, as a side show to an ongoing rivalry between sister nations that remained bitter enemies seventy two years after Korea's Civil war was paused by a cease fire. Yet the public rarely heard the other half of the story, the North Korean rubbish attacks or payback for South Korea propaganda

balloons like parks. The geopolitics of this tit for tat aerial dispute, however, wasn't nearly as illuminating to me as the earnest motivations of the South Korean activists, many of whom are in fact North Korean defectors. The teams of balloonists appeared driven by a marooned sword of longing for all they've left irrevocably behind, abandoned loved ones, landscapes of memory, youth. When it comes to the finality of exile, North Koreans

rank in a bleique class of their own. Among some thirty four thousand defectors in South Korea, barely a few dozen are known to have voluntarily returned to the brutal clutches of their police state. In this way, the strange balloon War resembles texts exchanged between a couple in a toxic relationship, with one partner appealing for connection while the

other replies with trash talk. The exchanges carry added poignancy, since reunification of the two countries seems more implausible than ever to day, fewer and fewer young South Koreans support it, while North Korea has pivoted decisively away. My family is very lucky, very grateful to be free, said Park, twenty eight, who grew up in North Korea, listening to Western radio broadcasts, muffled under a blanket in his bed, a thought, I'm

punishable by prison. We are not just living life for ourselves now, but for the people back in North Korea. Energetic and wyree Park recounted in confidence his perilous escape from North Korea with four relatives more than a decade ago. Now a youth organizer for an evangelical church outside of Seoul, he explained how fellow Christians in North Korea risked execution for practicing their faith under the cult like rule of

Supreme leader Kim Jong un. He also bemoaned the sinister reach of North Korea's intelligence agencies, which had poisoned the dictator's own brother in exile in Malaysia. Arriving as a teenager in Go Go, South Korea from repressive North Korea, Park recalled had felt like being a person from the nineteen seventies transported to modern day New York. North Koreans find it very hard here side Kim Sung's chul. Reflecting on the balloonist expians, some South Koreans see North Koreans

as less intelligent, primitive. An older generation defector, Kim arrived in South Korea nineteen ninety three after walking away from a work camp in Siberia. He now operates a pro democracy radio station in Seoul. Even after three decades in the country, Kim noted dryly he sometimes feels like an outsider. His South Korean wife has been reproached by her friends.

Why are you still living with the North Korean? Though sailing private balloons into the North was criminalized in twenty twenty, the prohibition was struck down by South Korea's Constitutional Court two years ago on free speech grounds. Still, the night launches remain a fraught, calling Soul doesn't appreciate the diplomatic aggravation the police issue hefty safety finds Lee Minbak, a Craigie defector in his sixties, had his balloon truck torched.

This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has it's been Marcia. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.