The arid lands of Fayoum, southwest of Cairo, were unrecognizable 30 million years ago. Where an ocean of sand is expanding today once was flourishing lush forests where wild life abounded. It is here that a team of scientists has exhumed the remains of a formidable super-predator.
BASTETODON SYRTOSferocious carnivorous, with its titanic jaws and sharp teeth, embodied the quintessence of the perfect hunter in these old forests. A new species described in full in a study published on February 16 in the journal Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Here is a small summary.
Bastodon: an outstanding hunter in Fayoum forests
In the rocky sediments of this region, the Bastodon left its footprint, and revealed at the same time the existence of a member hitherto unknown to the order of Hyaenodonta. These creatures, competing in size with the great current cats, reigned as absolute masters on African ecosystems After the extinction of dinosaurs.
His name pays homage to the Egyptian goddess Bastet, an emblematic figure of mythology often represented with a cat’s head in its animal form. She was revered as the goddess of the home, fertility, protection and maternity. Responsible for punishing the enemies of Egypt and restoring order, it could sometimes be ruthless towards those who opposed the divine will. This is why the Bastodon was so named.
The skull found (see video below) by paleontologists is that of an animal perfectly cut for hunting : overpowered masticator muscles and a dentition comparable to that of hyena, but even more sophisticated. He tracked his prey – primitive primates, ancestors of hippopotams, ancestral elephants and hyracks of small herbivorous mammals resembling beavers – in dense thickets which once covered the region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FF7QYFKKRW
Subscribe to press-citron
An exceptional site to understand the evolution of mammals
“” While we were pretending to conclude our work, a member of the team identified something remarkable: a series of large teeth emerging from the ground. His enthusiastic exclamation alerted the team, signaling an extraordinary discovery: the almost intact skull of a former superpredator, the dream of any paleontologist specializing in vertebrates “Relates Shorouq al-Ashqar, paleontologist at the University of Mansoura and co-author of the study.
The update of Bastodon had a completely unexpected domino effect on the understanding of another fossil, discovered more than a century ago in the same lands. This fossil, belonging to a hyenodonte (diversified group of carnivorous mammals, now extinguished) from the size of a lion, had been initially classified among European lines in 1904.
Today, he has been renamed Sekhmetops by the team, in tribute to Sekhmet, the warlike goddess to the head of Lioness. Bastodon’s skull analysis allowed researchers to understand that These two creatures belonged to the same linenot from Europe as we thought, but born on African soil.
Matt Barths, conservative of the fossils at the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History, explains the primordial importance of this region for this scientific field. “” Fayoum is a real paleontological treasure for Africa. Without him, our knowledge on the formation of African ecosystems and the evolution of mammals such as elephants, primates and hyenodontes would be extremely incomplete ».
The reign of Bastotodon and Sekhmetops ended, about 25 million years ago, Victims of the oligocene climate and tectonic upheavals. The atmosphere has cooled, the precipitation diets have also been modified, with regions becoming more arid and others more humid, and the ecological niches have changed. Many species then disappeared, for lack of being able to adapt, but Others appeared : ancestors of felines, canids and modern hyenas, herbivores (ancestors of cows, deer, etc.) and primates of all kinds. Just as many potential prey as our two super-predators could never put himself under the tooth !
- A team of paleontologists discovered in Egypt a new kind of fierce carnivore, BASTETODON SYRTOS,, which dominated the forests 30 million years ago.
- The recently found skull analysis made it possible to reclassify an old specimen and confirm the African origin of these missing predators.
- Climate change and the arrival of new mammals led to the disappearance of these hunters before they can adapt.
