The Sahel country is one of the few African nations to boast rare dinosaurs, but safeguarding them is a challenge.
Niamey, Niger – In a corner of the sprawling grounds of Niamey’s only museum – a unique, open-air style arrangement in Niger’s capital that doubles as a zoo – imposing fossil replicas of long-extinct animals stand in a corrugated iron stall.
On a recent late Friday afternoon, the Boubou Hama National Museum was busy with scores of excited children. They shrilled, delighted by the rubbery grunts of the hippos near the replicas, and the faint roars of the lions further up.
Laughter floated over to the fossil exhibition, but the replacement bones, made of resin, and which included those of a long-necked dinosaur called a jobaria, its smaller, sail-backed cousin, and a very long crocodile, were largely left alone, save for two men who stopped by for quick selfies.
While living animals today may steal the show, Niger’s fossils represent rare evidence of the life that flourished in this part of the continent before humans. Original bones are stored in a room on the complex to avoid damage and theft, or are housed in museums abroad.
Much of the Sahara, including a vast swath of northern Niger, which lies within the desert, is replete with dinosaur and animal remains like these, waiting to be discovered by scientists who aim to paint a picture of what the world used to look like.
“More than a hundred million years ago, can you imagine that?” asks the museum’s director-general, Abdouramane Gabidan, in a wondrous tone, as he looks at the exhibition through the iron railings protecting it.
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It’s hard to imagine, he says, that present-day arid Niger was once lush forests and huge water bodies in which vanished animals and, later, civilisations thrived.
Dinosaurs, for one, lived about 252 to 66 million years ago, during a period scientists refer to as the Mesozoic era. Climatic changes, however, after a huge asteroid crashed into Earth, caused a mass extinction event that wiped the creatures out, scientists believe. After dinosaurs, early hunter-gatherer humans co-existed with wildlife in the once-green Sahara.
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