A red escarpment running along the Morocco and Algeria border in the southeast of the country, below the Atlas, holding river and delta beds of Cenomanian age that are famous for predators. Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus both come out of this rock, along with crocodile relatives, pterosaurs and sawfish the size of a car. Palaeontologists have pointed out that the fauna looks impossibly crowded with big meat eaters, and the likeliest reading is that animals separated by habitat and by millions of years have been mixed together by the geology and by the way material is collected. The beds split into the lower Ifezouane and upper Aoufous formations in the east and the Gara Sbaa and Douira in the Tafilalt to the south. Be careful with anything bought in the market towns: composite fossils assembled from several animals are a local industry.
Spinosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and giant sawfish · Late Cretaceous, Cenomanian
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.
Morocco
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