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The crew meticulously combs the exposures in which, this week, Dominic has found a hominid skull fragment. MORE PHOTOS >>
WEEK 10 Text and photographs by Louise Leakey

his week we managed to finish off in Area 123. Nothing relevant came out of the hominid excavation – many bits of fish and fragments of unrelated bone. We had a fun morning in Area 123 north collecting a complete fossil tortoise, one might have been able to get a ride on it back to the car had it been alive today. It would have looked exactly like the famous and endangered giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands. They have been around for many millions of years. It was an incredibly windy morning and trying to fold the tissue paper and cover it for plastering proved quite tricky! There were many other specimens that we collected from the surrounding area. With this area completed we moved to Area 119. This is the site that houses the museum field exhibits of the Giant Tortoise and Euthecodon crocodile skeleton. My mother,  sister and I spent several weeks excavating these when we were little. The tortoise is big enough that if you filled it with water you could almost take a comfortable bath in it.
 
A National Geographic film crew filming in Turkana.
We had many problems in camp this week as the generator had a problem and although we fortunately run most of the equipment on solar power we need the generator to operate the water desalination plant to produce fresh drinking water from the alkaline lake. Fortunately a family visiting Koobi Fora this week were able to bring up an electrician to get things working again. We were very grateful for this. They visited us at the site and we showed them how we collect fossils in the field. On the same day a National Geographic film crew arrived to spend a few days with the team filming work in progress. During the first morning out with the film crew Dominic found a hominid skull fragment and christopher found an isolated hominid molar! We were worried that the film crew might think that finding hominid fossils was easy and happened every day. It was exciting though as it gave them the chance to film the real thing in the field with the crew to show how it is all done!

We also spent a morning with them doing some aerial shots of the fossil exposures. They strapped the fancy camera to the wing of the plane and we flew in the early morning while the air was still calm and the light soft so we could get the best shots of the surrounding badlands with long shadows. Many crocodiles galloped into the water as we flew along the shoreline and over the camp. Flying with the windows open was incredibly noisy.

Louise Leakey,
Koobi Fora
April, 2004

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION: The Koobi Fora Research Project annual paleoanthropological expedition.
LOCATION: The area surrounding Lake Turkana, in the extreme north of Kenya. This region is extremely rich in hominid fossils and has produced some of the oldest dates for Homo. Launch Position Locator.
PURPOSE: To increase knowledge of the origins of our genus, Homo, and the context in which we evolved.

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