During the Cretaceous Period, the earliest divergence of mammalian orders was taking place, and the South Atlantic was beginning to open. Fossil vertebrates of Cretaceous age from west Africa are extremely rare, but potentially important to our understanding of the early history of mammals and the extinction of dinosaurs. Drs. Jacobs and Flynn have collected some fossil vertebrates from Cretaceous rocks from Cameroon, and they propose to explore the fossil-bearing deposits more completely, and to identify the fossil groups discovered. The proposed research could greatly improve our understanding of the early evolution of mammals, and of how the geographic distribution of vertebrates was affected by the separation of continents during the late Mesozoic.
