What Is the Koobi Fora Research Project Featured on Leakey Journeys?

The Koobi Fora Research Project (KFRP) is the long-running paleoanthropology field program at Lake Turkana in East Africa's Turkana Basin, and it is the scientific core of what Leakey Journeys presents. On leakeyjourneys.org, KFRP appears as the source of the site's fossil discoveries, its archive of six decades of field photographs and notes, and its recent announcement of new Paranthropus boisei hand and foot fossils. If you want to understand the fieldwork behind the site's human-origins content, KFRP is the place to start.

What the project is and where it works

Leakey Journeys describes the Turkana Basin as a vast landscape where millions of years of evolutionary history are preserved and fossils are still being exposed by erosion. KFRP is the field effort that finds, recovers, and studies those fossils before they disintegrate. The site frames this work as both exploration and rescue: without active recovery, irreplaceable specimens can be lost once natural erosion exposes them.

The project is tied to the Leakey family legacy. Leakey Journeys was founded by Louise Leakey, a third-generation Kenyan paleoanthropologist, and the site presents KFRP as part of that continuing lineage of fieldwork.

The numbers the site reports

Leakey Journeys gives a compact set of figures that summarize the project's scale:

These numbers are the site's own summary of KFRP's output, not an independent audit. They are useful as a sense of scale: tens of thousands of specimens, hundreds of them hominins, accumulated across more than half a century.

The recent Paranthropus boisei discovery

The site's newest update concerns hand and foot fossils of Paranthropus boisei, described as a distant cousin to humans. According to Leakey Journeys, the find significantly extends understanding of the evolution of tool use and bipedality within the human family tree. The announcement links to a fuller write-up ("Read more here"), which is where you would go for the anatomical detail and the publication behind the claim.

For a general reader, the takeaway is that KFRP is not only an archival project. New fossils are still being recovered and interpreted, and the site treats those results as part of its public education mission.

What you can actually access through Leakey Journeys

The site offers several ways to follow KFRP without being in the field:

• Fossil Cam — a live camera positioned at a fossil being prepared in the lab or at an excavation, described as "a small window into the workday."
• From the Archives — six decades of photographs, field notes, and fossil records, including dated images such as Kamoya Kimeu and Richard Leakey in 1972, field research at Lake Turkana in 1971, and a camel expedition to Ileret in 1969.
• Video Library — footage of the team uncovering fossils at Lake Turkana.
• Publications and updates — expedition reports and discovery announcements.

The archive is the strongest resource for anyone researching the project's history, because it preserves the visual and documentary record alongside the fossil data.

How to use this if you are researching human origins

If your goal is to understand KFRP's role rather than visit, a practical path is:

1. Start with the site's summary statistics and mission statement to fix the project's scope and time frame.
2. Read the Paranthropus boisei announcement for the most current research result, then follow its "Read more" link for the underlying detail.
3. Use the archive photographs and field notes to trace how fieldwork at Lake Turkana developed from the 1967 first expedition onward.
4. Check the video library and Fossil Cam for a sense of method — how fossils are found, excavated, and prepared.

One caveat: the site presents KFRP through an educational and outreach lens. For formal scientific claims, treat the site's summaries as a starting point and follow its links to the primary publications it references.