Cassandra Vivian....... The Western Desert Of Egypt ( By House Of Books)

Author:Vivian, Cassandra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Egypt, Egyptian Oasis

Arsinoitherium Redrawn from a catalog by Charles Williams Andrews

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Zeuglodon

modern elephant. It is found in both marine deposits of the Eocene in the Fayoum and the ancient beds of Lake Moeris (north of Wadi Natrun). It was a heavy, fat, one meter (3 foot) high animal with a short snout, and lived in swampland. It had short, heavy legs with wide feet and flat hooves. It did not have a trunk but its upper lip was elongated and highly mobile. It had cusped teeth. It lived in the thickets around the lakes and marshes during the late Eocene, 36 to 45 million years ago.

Palaeomastodon and Phioma are early mastodons with four tusks, a short trunk, and long necks and skulls, both descendants of Moeritherium. Unlike the modern elephant, which has two tusks, these early elephants had two pairs: one pair in each of the upper and lower jaws. The Palaeomastodon was 1.5 meters (8 feet) tall at the shoulder. The Phiomia was 2.4 meters (7.6 feet) high with long legs, a bulbous skull, and perhaps a trunk.

All of the mammals above were -prey for the Apterodon, Pterodon, and Hyaenodon, who, with teeth as sharp as knives, probably found the slow-moving ancient elephant-and rhino-types easy prey.

Zeuglodon, the Basilosaurus isis, is an ancient whale, and over 240 skeletons have been found in an 8-square-kilometer (5-square-mile) area in the Wadi Zeuglodon, obviously named in its honor. The Wadi Zeuglodon was once a bay and the whales died here in great numbers. (See Wadi Zeuglodon below for more details.)

Primates

The most studied fossils of the Gebel Qatrani Formation are Eocene and Oligocene primates, which swung through the treetops in the tropical forests of the Fayoum between 28 and 35 million years ago. This extensive and diverse grouping is unique to the Fayoum and when first discovered were believed to be the earliest relatives of apes and monkeys. Their continuous study has dramatically changed scientific theories about primate evolution.

As noted earlier, Richard Markgraf found a piece of what became the first discovered Fayoum primate in 1907. The find, called Apidium, was published by Henry Osborn in 1908. At the time they were not sure it was a primate, but several primate fossils were sold by Markgraf to the American Museum of Natural History and the Naturalkabinett

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in Stuttgart, Germany. For the next nearly ioo years the work has continued, until today we know a great deal about primates in Egypt.

From a review of primate work in the Fayoum by Elwyn L. Simons and D. Tab Rasmussen we learn that primates lived under forest conditions in the Eocene and Oligocene times and that there are two distinct groups of primates in the Fayoum fossil beds, lower sequence primates and upper sequence primates. The lower primate is the least known and,most rare. It includes Oligopithecus savagei and Qatrania wingi. The former's teeth patterns identify it as a link between Eocene prosimians and Oligocene anthropoideans. Of the early Oligopithecus savagei we only have a jaw and a few teeth discovered by Simons in 1962.

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