Abderrazak El Albani, a Marrakech-born geologist and professor at the University of Poitiers, has published a book recounting the journey that began with a 2010 paper in Nature — a paper that unsettled a consensus the scientific community had treated as settled for decades. His team’s research in the Gabonese Franceville basin established that multicellular life had emerged 2.1 billion years ago, not 600 million years ago as the prevailing literature had long maintained. The gap of 1.4 billion years triggered intense scientific debate. Dernières nouvelles des origines de la vie, published in April 2026, traces that controversy and the research it catalyzed across Gabon, Ukraine, Mauritania, and above all Morocco.
The Moroccan discoveries described in the book are of exceptional scientific importance. The most spectacular concerns trilobites found in the eastern High Atlas, preserved inside volcanic ash layers dating to 515 million years ago. Discovered by British geologists working near Agadir in 2015 and passed to El Albani for analysis, the specimens were initially set aside. Only in 2021 did a reexamination reveal their extraordinary significance: the volcanic ash, which falls into ocean water at temperatures up to 500 degrees before cooling, had enveloped the trilobites to form an instantaneous three-dimensional mould — effectively a marine Pompeii. The fossils are the best-preserved trilobites in the world, revealing anatomical details never previously observed.
A 2024 paper in Science, which the journal featured on its cover, described two new species and identified the first documented instance of commensalism in the fossil record — small brachiopods living on the trilobites’ shells without harming or benefiting them.
A second Moroccan site, Amane Tazgart in the Anti-Atlas, yielded 571-million-year-old bacterial colonies found in conditions considered hostile to life: an ancient volcanic lake that was highly alkaline, oxygen-poor, and arsenic-rich. These extremophile bacteria nonetheless proliferated into accumulations of over ten meters in depth. El Albani notes that such conditions closely resemble environments associated with Mars, where NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently investigating the Jezero crater for traces of ancient biological activity. A third site, Jbel Irhoud near Marrakech, is the subject of a planned research extension: 2017 datings established that Homo sapiens remains found there are approximately 315,000 years old, pushing back the known age of our species by 100,000 years.
El Albani has built durable academic cooperation structures with Morocco, including an Erasmus-Plus project linking Poitiers with five Moroccan universities, a joint project with the Hassan II Academy of Sciences and Techniques, and a five-year international research project backed by the French CNRS. These initiatives open pathways for Moroccan doctoral and master’s students to work at Poitiers under funded conditions.
The chapter of the interview that carries the sharpest edge concerns the looting of geological sites. The Mibladen site in the Middle Atlas, where pterosaur footprints had been studied since 2024, was ransacked shortly after the first scientific publications appeared — despite repeated public alerts by researchers. In the Anti-Atlas, entire geological formations have been cleared. Foreign universities and researchers, El Albani notes, routinely collect material from Morocco — sometimes by filling containers, sometimes by purchasing specimens from dealers — and publish scientific results in leading journals without a single Moroccan co-author. The irreplaceable scientific value of Morocco’s geological heritage, he warns, is being permanently destroyed.
