An island about 16 kilometres long in the eastern part of Lake Victoria at the mouth of the Winam Gulf, joined to the Kenyan mainland by the Mbita bridge. Volcanic ash from an old carbonatite volcano buried an early Miocene forest here and preserved it, and the island became the type ground for Proconsul, the extinct ape genus that lived 21 to 17 million years ago and sits close to the ancestry of gibbons, great apes and ourselves. Four species are known, differing mostly in size, and the reconstructions of their world run from closed forest to open dry grassland. The glittering black sand on the beaches is not ordinary sand at all: it is melanite garnet, barkevikite hornblende and magnetite eroded out of the lava that overlies the fossil beds.
Proconsul and the Miocene apes of Lake Victoria · Early Miocene, 21-17 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Kenya
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