Our team led by Bibi has just returned from a month’s fieldwork in the Pleistocene deposits of the upper Atbara River in eastern Sudan. This was the second season there and the first of a 3 year project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Lots of cool fossils found! Besides the Museum für Naturkunde, our team includes partners from Alneelain University, the International African University, and the University of Khartoum, as well as Technical University (Berlin), the Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics (Hannover), Western University (USA), and the University of Bordeaux. Fossils and lithics en route to Berlin for study, rock samples for paleoenvironmental analysis and OSL and ESR dating. Stay tuned.

Faysal Bibi just returned from Abu Dhabi for filming part of a documentary by PBS and Smithsonian Channel on the evolution of elephants. Shooting took place at the site of Mleisa 1, which records the trackways of prehistoric elephants that walked across the Abu Dhabi landscape 7 million years ago. The site is important because it preserves the footprints of a herd of individuals, suggesting that Miocene elephants exhibited similar social structure as elephants today.

In January 2018, Faysal Bibi led an international team in a paleontological survey of the upper Atbara River and Setit River Valleys in eastern Sudan. Previous work had documented the presence of middle to late Pleistocene sites in the region and our team discovered many more new localities and a diverse fauna. This work was supported by a National Geographic Explorer’s Grant and the German Research Foundation (DFG), and included Johannes Müller (MfN), Robert Bussert (TU Berlin), Brian Kraatz (Western U.), and colleagues Ali Eisawi from Neelain University and Omer el Bedri from African University in Khartoum.

In April 2017, our team described a new species of fossil hippopotamus from the late Miocene Baynunah Formation in the United Arab Emirates. In a study published in the journal Palaeovertebrata, scientists led by Jean-Renaud Boisserie described the species Archaeopotamus qeshta, a primitive hippo with close relatives previously described from late Miocene to early Pleistocene sites in Kenya and possibly Tanzania. The new species name ‘queshta’ comes from the Egyptian name for the modern hippopotamus ‘sayed qeshta’ (سيد قشطى) which means ‘Mr. Cream’.

Reference: Boisserie, J.-R., M. Schuster, M. Beech, A. Hill, and F. Bibi. 2017. A new species of hippopotamine (Cetartiodactyla, Hippopotamidae) from the late Miocene Baynunah Formation, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Palaeovertebrata 41:doi: 10.18563/pv.41.1.e2

Our team has  published two  papers reviewing all the fossil species that we and previous teams have found from the Baynunah Formation of the Al Gharbiya region of Abu Dhabi Emirate.

The first is titled Before archaeology: life and environments in the Miocene of Abu Dhabi (pdf), from the book Fifty Years of Emirates Archaeology (editors D. Potts & P. Hellyer), published in 2012.

The second, also a book chapter, is titled Late Miocene Fossils from the Baynunah Formation, United Arab Emirates: Summary of a Decade of New Work (pdf), from a recently published book called Fossil Mammals of Asia (Columbia Univ. Press, editors X. Wang, M. Fortelius, L. Flynn).

In addition to providing information on the wide range of animals that existed in Abu Dhabi in the Late Miocene, these papers also review the history of discovery of fossils in the Al Gharbia region. The reviews (especially the second one) also compare the similarity of these  late Miocene fossil animals to those from Africa and Asia, showing that the region at the time housed a mix of African and southern Asian animals that is not recorded anywhere else.

To anyone previously unfamiliar with the subject, these reviews show quite clearly the diversity of prehistoric animals that used to live in this part of the Arabian Peninsula. This large diversity of everything from shells to crocodiles, rodents, birds, monkeys, and elephants was supported by a river system that once flowed through what is now the U.A.E., and that has long since gone dry and disappeared.

Excavating lower jaws of a proboscidean at the site of Hamra 3-1. To the south, in the background, are the upper beds of the Baynunah Formation. Taken on 17 December, 2007.

Map and satellite image of Al Gharbia showing main fossil localities. Black circles denote localities with body fossils, white circles denote fossil trackway sites.

Stratigraphy and magnetostratigraphy of the Baynunah Formation. Body fossils (of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants) are recovered from multiple horizons in the lower part of the Baynunah, while footprint fossils are recorded from carbonates correlating to the upper portion. Stratigraphic column reproduced from Ditchfield (1999, fig. 7.2), and paleomagnetic data from Hailwood and Whybrow (1999, fig. 8.5). The high frequency of polarity reversals in the period between 8 and 6Ma means any correlation of the Baynunah with the GPTS is equivocal, but the presence of at least 4 reversals in the Baynunah suggests a duration of 300,000 years or more for the Baynunah Formation.

One of a herd of proboscidean (elephant) trackways at the site of Mleisa 1.