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NATURE
General information
Natural
Emirates
Key animals
Captive breeding
of rare breeds
Watching whales and
dolphins in the UAE
Scorpions and snakes
The coasts
Desert
The Mountains
Ornithological importance
of UAE
Environmental agencies
Fossil hunting
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FOSSIL-HUNTING
If palaeontology is your specialty, you will be
interested to know that, according to scientists from the Natural History
Museum in London, who have been conducting research in the area for some
time, the UAE has the finest locations for discovering Middle East Cretaceous
marine invertebrates and late Miocene Arabian
continental vertebrate fossils. The three areas of importance are the
Western Region of Abu Dhabi, the slopes of Jebel Hafit and the eastern
mountains.
In the west, mainly around the coastal region to the north of the Abu
Dhabi to As Sila road in the area from Tarif to Jebel Dhanna, jebels and
sea cliff localities expose rocks of Miocene
age called the Baynunah and Shuwaihat Formations.
This was the site of an ancient river system. Rare vertebrate fossils
have been found in these rocks, including the lower jaw of a hippopotamus,
the fragmented skull of an 8 million year old crocodile, and the molar
tooth of a primitive elephant. Near to As Sila itself, 16 million year
old marine carbonates outcrop at the foot of the escarpment years. Poorly
preserved fossils such as gastropods and bivalves can with some difficulty
be found in the rocks that were deposited in a shallow tropical sea.
At the foot of Jebel
Hafit,
near where the road from the cement works passes through a man-made gorge,
numerous fossils of the important marine microfossil, Nummulites, almost
the size of a bottle-top, can be found. With them, lying loose on the
scree slopes, are fragments of branching corals, oysters and gastropods,
rare sea urchins and, even rarer, remains of barnacles and crab claws,
all evidence that this region was part of a shallow tropical sea about
30 million years ago.
At the northern part of the jebel north towards Al Ain, south of the Khalid
bin Sultan road, eroded flanks of the anticline are exposed in the wadi.
Here very hard, massive limestones are preserved with their beds in a
near vertical position. Numerous coral ‘heads’ are found here,
some about 60 cm in diameter. The fossils in the eastern mountains were
formed during the Cretaceous Period, 70 million years ago when a shallow
warm sea lapped against the uplifted Hajar islands. The limestones formed
in this period are now called the Simsima
Formation. The best exposures are found at
Jebel Huwayyah – known as Fossil Valley, Jebel Rawdah, Jebel Buhays
and Qarn Murrah.
Palaeontologists have identified more than 200 species of marine animals
in the Simsima limestones, some new to science and one of the most diverse
faunas of this age known anywhere in the world. Hidden in deep wadis in
the Emirate of Fujairah lie outcrops of marine rocks deposited at the
time that dinosaurs flourished – 150 million years ago. Various fragments
of poorly preserved corals, sponges algae and bivalves can be found.
For more information on fossils and geology CLICK
HERE
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