Sometimes you unearth amazing discoveries in the deep masquerading shade under an arch of limestone in the scorching fossil fields of a desert in Kenya. Other times it’s in the backside of a drawer!
What Ohio University scientists Nancy Stevens and Matthew Borths have discovered is no less impressive just because they didn’t get their hands dirty finding it! Intending to study the bones of ancient hyaenas tucked away in hundreds of drawers of the Nairobi National Museum, Nancy discovered the world’s biggest ever lion!
Last month one of the last known super 
The rains had finally restarted. For at least a month before they finally returned the buffalo in the crater wandered back and forth searching for every blade of grass that still grew. Cyclone Ida had stolen every drop of water from East Africa for her tempest against southern Africa.
The Old Man Giraffe was all alone. Easily stripping the delectable little acacia leaves from the healthy branches, his old tongue only occasionally got stuck on one of the thick thorns the tree used to try to deter him. In fact he had his choice of dozens of blossoming trees! He was the only giraffe we saw all morning long in Lake Manyara National Park. We usually see 20-30.
We finished four days and hundred of miles through the Serengeti, found the migration in multiple places and ended for our last two nights at Tanzania’s famous Crater Lodge.
Equatorial weather is the most complex in the world: jetstreams tangle with each other from every direction. Weather forms but doesn’t move; the thunderstorm grows over you ominously and then dumps itself out of existence.
For a million years the huge rock hill with steep sides stood undisturbed in the middle of the Great Northern Frontier, alone on 200,000 acres yet in the shadow of the sacred Samburu mountain, Ololokwe. Then, a camp was built on its top.
The Botswana elephant story is out of hand. Elephants Without Borders (
Hours ago a Botswana government 
White man once again plucks discovery from black people’s commonplace. Didn’t colonialism end last century? What about slavery? There are many to blame, but once again, NatGeo’s at the forefront.
Yesterday the Tanzania 
There are three countries in the world where you can sit down with a mountain gorilla (gorilla beringei beringei) for an hour of very unique animal viewing: Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC. This is because this gorilla’s single habitat area overlays the point where these countries border one another.
At the end of six days in two different big game reserves in South Africa each of my two separate groups was beaming. They’d seen leopards, lions, wild dogs, black and white rhino, elephant, honey badger, multiple kinds of antelope … it was a dream come true! They’d seen everything in the wild!
Our car skids a bit on the bend in the red dirt road that’s partly obscured by thick twiggy bushes. My fellow travelers ooh with amazement as the driver slams on the brakes. Cameras click in awe-struck silence at 17 wildebeest and 8 zebra. I feel the most horrible pains of homesickness.
Today is World Lion Day, an unofficial designation employed by wildlife organizations. In the last quarter century the population of The King has