Today, it’s all about teeth. Not about my teeth, not about any human’s teeth, not about any ancient hominid’s teeth, but it’s about ancient animal teeth. For today, we are visiting a gulley in the Gorge that has an abundance of surface level fossils including bones and teeth. Our main goal is to find and collect these teeth to try and identify the ancient species . From there, we will try to reconstruct the environment based on the animals that were present.
Once the morning hit and we were at the gulley, the search for teeth was on. One thing I took from this activity was that I may not make for a good ancient dentist as my bag of teeth was looking quite bare by the end of the search period. Luckily, other people were having much better luck than me and were able to share later on when we visited the museum to identify the teeth.
One exciting tooth that we found and identified was the tooth of a metridiochoerus (pictured). The metridiochoerus was an ancient and now extinct suid that is commonly known as the giant warthog. Since I was assigned the suid taxon, metridiochoerus was actually a species I researched before coming to Tanzania. It was fascinating to see a real fossil tooth from the giant warthog. It was also a fun practice in identifying the tooth and distinguishing it from a similar relative, the kolpochoerus. For the metridiochoerus, the main distinguishing factor was the high tooth crown that was indicative of a grazing diet, while the kolpochoerus had a low crown indicative of browsing.
Metridiochoerus Tooth and Museum Display
After all the work with teeth, we visited the Leakey Museum in the afternoon. It was very interesting to see the simplicity of older research stations, and it was even more scary to see some of the spiders that call it home now (pictured). One of the coolest parts of the museum tour was the lab building where we actually found old work from Dr. Prendergast. It was another amazing full circle moment that helped me to appreciate the knowledge wealth of those part of the course and it made me look forward to seeing what is in store for the future days!
Some Spiders in the Leakey Dorm (I would not want to sleep here!)
-Milton
