Morabit Marbre Fossils, Erfoud

Our first detour after we left our Merzouga desert camp on our cross-country drive was a fossil factory or rock shop – Morabit Marbre Fossils, at Erfoud – the fossil capital of Morocco.

During the Devonian period, the Paleozoic Era, from about 450 million years ago, this area of the Sahara was the floor of a large prehistoric ocean. It is now prime digging grounds for fossil hunters. We stopped by a fossil field the day before when were exploring the area. See earlier post here.

The most common fossils here are trilobites. Trilobite fossils are found worldwide, with many thousands of known species.

Shown above are ammonites which were molluscs (like squid, octopus) but they had a hard coiled tubular shell as well as a soft body. In its shell, there was a series of progressively larger chambers that are divided by thin walls. Apparently, only the last and largest chamber, the body chamber, was occupied by the living animal at any given moment. As it grew, it added newer and larger chambers to the open end of the coil. The ammonites first appeared in the Devonian period (circa 409 million years ago) and became virtually extinct at the close of the Cretaceous period (circa 66 million years ago) along with the dinosaurs.

We bought one which had been sliced open into two halves and were polished.

I found a rock with numerous ammonites on a digging site from a day earlier. See earlier post here.

This workshop/shop has a courtyard full of large sheets of rocks in which are embedded the fossilized organisms.

Photographs show workers breaking up huge pieces of marble/rocks by pneumatic drilling, and hauling the big pieces back to the workshop where sheets of rocks were carefully sliced off like white bread.  Some of the sheets are about about 10 cm thick.

They are made into ornamental displays, or practical things like tabletops, fountain and bathroom pieces.

In addition to the regular patterns of marble, the slabs of marble on offer here contain fragments of fossils scattered in it.

Apparently, it is rare to find fossils in perfect condition so the miners take their finds to fossil “factory” to have them restored. The composition and placement of the fossils on these slabs (see photo below) looked a bit too perfect to me. Perhaps the fossil themselves are genuine but they were assembled and fixed in a new background.

It must be worrisome for shoppers to hear that fossil replicas can be made from plaster, plastic or even auto-body putty. Not knowing what the real deal looks like, it can be hard to distinguish them.

The shop also offers a huge selection of rocks and minerals. Some are in their natural form.

We were the only customers in this showroom. But during peak season, there must be busload of tourists descending on this emporium.