8.20.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Marcia for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the first article

(00:24):
entitled how to Retrieve fifty five tons of Dinosaur Bones
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

(00:47):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:53):
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

(02:16):
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

(02:37):
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.

(02:59):
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

(03:22):
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

(03:45):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:50):
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

(05:13):
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

(05:35):
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

(05:55):
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.

(06:18):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:00):
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

(07:21):
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

(07:43):
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

(08:06):
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

(08:27):
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

(08:49):
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

(09:13):
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

(09:38):
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

(09:59):
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

(10:23):
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

(10:47):
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

(11:09):
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.

(11:33):
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

(11:55):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:39):
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

(13:00):
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

(13:20):
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,

(13:43):
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.

(14:08):
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

(14:30):
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

(14:52):
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,

(15:14):
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

(15:38):
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

(16:01):
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.

(16:23):
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.

(16:44):
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

(17:10):
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

(17:32):
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

(17:52):
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

(18:12):
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

(18:32):
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

(18:52):
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

(19:16):
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

(19:37):
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.

(19:58):
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

(20:23):
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

(20:44):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:26):
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

(21:47):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:54):
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.

(23:17):
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

(23:40):
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

(24:02):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:47):
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

(25:09):
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

(25:31):
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,

(25:53):
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.

(26:16):
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

(26:36):
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

(26:59):
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.

(27:22):
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

(27:45):
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.