Khinjaria acutus was bigger than a great white shark, with blade-like teeth and awesome jaws. Just as well it died out 67m years ago

Name: Khinjaria acutus .

Age: About 67m to 69m years old.

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Soufiane Ababri is so against the notion of painters at their easels that he always makes his erotic, irreverent and riotously colourful drawings lying down. Ahead of a major UK show, he reels off the many advantages

Soufiane Ababri, the young, taboo-breaking star of Morocco’s modern art scene, sees creativity as a way to “invert the insults” he has heard all his life. Growing up gay in Morocco, and then becoming an immigrant in France, he was part of what he calls a post-colonial generation, in which people of colour felt fetishised and were often subject to violence. His answer to all the name-calling and worse is an approach to drawing that is irreverent, erotic and full of riotously bright colours. “It’s all about transforming the stigma,” Ababri says.

So when Ababri saw the crescent shape of the Barbican’s Curve gallery in London , where he is about to stage his first solo show at a major UK institution, it reminded him of the curling form of the Arabic letter zayn (ز), and the z sound at the start of the word zamel, a derogatory term for gay men. “It’s a word I heard at school,” he says. “I have no doubt queer and LGBT children in Morocco still face it: that repeated zzzz sound, like a bumblebee, as you walk past people in school corridors.” This persecution gives his show its title: Their mouths were full of bumblebees but it was me who was pollinated .

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Parts of the structure are younger than expected while an east wind blows the whole thing across the desert, researchers find

They are impressive, mysterious structures that loom out of deserts on the Earth and are also found on Mars and on Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan.

Experts from universities including Aberystwyth in Wales have now pinpointed the age of a star dune in a remote area of Morocco and uncovered details about its formation and how it moves across the desert.

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Female weavers in a Berber-speaking village helped Amina Agueznay to create a work that won the Norval Sovereign African art prize

The idea of weaving an artwork from palm husks came to Amina Agueznay during a workshop she was leading in Morocco’s Souss-Massa region, as part of a project with local rug weavers to renovate Tissekmoudine, a ksar, or fortified village.

“The plan was to integrate the palm trees from the oasis in our designs, so I encouraged the women to look around them and use whatever material they could find,” says Agueznay, who this month won the Norval Sovereign African art prize , worth $35,000 (£28,000).

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As the only international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, 1-54 takes its name from the number of countries on the continent. The Marrakech edition is running this weekend until 11 February

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