What About Other Countries?

[caldigger]

Here is a puzzler and curiosity is getting the best of me.  We are always bombarded with examples of fossils from Morocco and Madagascar, but what about the other countries of the African continent?  Why do we never seem to hear about fossils from any of the other African nations?  Is it mostly due to laws restrictioning fossil export or is there a lack of stuff coming out of the lands south of the Sahara?  

[Miocene_Mason]

Mostly due to well known productive sites in those countries, combined with cheap labor and the relative ease of getting them (in morroco some will just go to the desert with a corkscrew shaped piece of metal and dig little mines in search of fossils) in east Africa laws are in place because of the hominids, same for South Africa. Egypt has antiquities laws that broadly apply for obvious reasons. I understand Namibia has some Precambrian fossils and south Eastern Africa has a few dinosaurs.

Forgot to say ^ this is a guess

[Wrangellian]

Also a lot of the other countries are unstable and undeveloped or Islamist and not conducive to tourism from the West or trade with the West...

Aside from that, I think few countries can match Morocco in sheer fossil abundance. They've got the Atlas Mtns which are not covered by too much vegetation and expose a long and rich fossil history, while many other countries are covered with a lot of sand or jungle.

This is just my guess too!

[jpc]

The two countries I am familiar with first hand, Niger and Tanzania, do not allow fossils to leave the country without a permit, which is only available to researchers.