A Moroccan dinosaur tail to help build schools in Mexico

The tail of a Sauropod, a dinosaur that once lived in the Atlas Mountains, spanning Morocco, will be auctioned to raise funds. That money will be used for the construction of schools destroyed by the earthquake that hit Mexico in September 2017, reports the International Business Times, an online economic newspaper.

The funds raised after the auction sheduled for Tuesday, January 23, will help rebuild and refurbish thousands of schools that were damaged or destroyed in the disaster. The fossils worth 1.8 million Mexican pesos (about 887,000 dirhams), according to the same source. The BBVA Bancomer Foundation, created by BBVA Bancomer, the largest Mexican financial group will manage the auction, redistributing the money for the repair and reconstruction of 5,000 schools, according to a Reuters report quoted by the International Business Times.

«Education is an element of enormous importance for the country, an element of social mobility, that is why we support the reconstruction of school», Adolfo Albo from BBVA Bancomer told the British news agency.

The fossils are a 17-meters long Sauropod tail that weights 22 tons. The creature has lived on earth 165 million years ago during the Jurassic geological period.

This is not the first discovery related to dinosaurs in Morocco. In 2014, Moroccan palaeontologist Nizar Ibrahim from the University of Chicago, alongside his American, French and British colleagues, successfully identified Theropods, Sauropods and Prnithopods. The researches carried out had shown that these dinosaurs had lived in Morocco during the Cretaceous period.