About This Project

Kazakhstan preserves a rich fossil record, including rare glimpses of some of the most important periods in vertebrate evolution with exceptional preservation. However, a lack of resources and international partnerships has caused Kazakhstan's fossil heritage to be underexplored and understudied. This campaign supports the start of a new collaborative project seeking to learn everything the Kazakh fossil record can teach us, and to build critical scientific resources in Kazakhstan.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Kazakhstan has a rich fossil record, spanning from long before the first dinosaurs ever walked on Earth up until nearly the present day. But as other countries with similarly rich fossil records like the US, Canada, Mongolia, and China have seen an explosive growth in fossil discovery, Kazakhstan's fossil record remains critically under-explored. The reasons for this are complex, and rooted in historical geopolitics and a continual lack international collaborative partnerships. We are pioneering a new expedition uniting researchers from the US and Kazakhstan, and seek support for our inaugural field season. This project is exploratory in nature, with general goals that we will refine into concrete hypotheses to test in future years. Our immediate goals are to solidify collaborative ties, collect new fossils from the famous locality Shakh-Shakh, and to revisit another historical locality (Syuk-Syuk), which we suspect holds many more fossils that await discovery.

What is the significance of this project?

Kazakhstan's fossil record is of special importance because it is one of the few countries preserving terrestrial fossils from two critical windows in vertebrate evolution - the Middle Jurassic and the mid-Cretaceous. These relatively narrow slices of geologic time appear to have been times of rapid, significant evolutionary change. The major lineages of modern terrestrial vertebrates appeared during the Middle Jurassic, and ecosystem-wide changes in the mid-Cretaceous led to an environmental revolution that created recognizably modern ecosystems. But fossils from these windows are rare, especially from terrestrial environments, and so we lack direct evidence to understand how and why these evolutionary revolutions actually happened. We have the beginning and end of the story, but we're missing the climax.

Our collaborative project seeks to address these crucial scientific questions over many field seasons, but all of this hinges upon success of our first field expedition.

What are the goals of the project?

In this field season, we will explore 2 fossil localities (comprising 4 total rock formations) dating to the Santonian stage of the Cretaceous. One, Shakh Shakh, has been continually worked, and continues to yield a wealth of important fossils. The other, Syuk-Syuk, has yielded exceptional articulated dinosaur skeletons, but has been largely unexplored for decades. We expect to collect and screen 1000 kg of sediment to search for microfossils like mammal teeth and fish scales. We cannot predict how many macrofossils we will find, but past expeditions have yielded at least one mammal bone, dozens of shark teeth, and dozens of dinosaur bones. We will also collect 1-2 geological samples per sedimentary horizon for potential geochronological and geomagnetic data. Our final goal is to cement the collaborative ties between our institutions and nations to ensure the long-term health of our field project, and to train two student team members from Kyzylorda University.