The newly discovered 10-foot-long (3 meters) species, dubbed Phiomicetus anubis, was a beast; When it was alive more than 43 million years ago, it both walked on land and swam in the water and had powerful jaw muscles that would have allowed it to easily chomp down on prey, such as crocodiles and small mammals, including the calves of other whale species. 

What's more, the whale's skull bears a resemblance to the skull of the jackal-headed Anubis, giving it another link to the death deity, the researchers observed. "It was a successful, active predator," study lead author Abdullah Gohar, a graduate student of vertebrate paleontology at Mansoura University in Egypt, told Live Science. "I think it was the god of death for most animals that lived alongside it."

Although today's whales live in the water, their ancestors started out on land and gradually evolved into sea creatures. The earliest known whale, the wolf-size Pakicetus attocki, lived about 50 million years ago in what is now Pakistan. The new discovery of Phiomicetus anubis sheds more light on whale evolution, said Jonathan Geisler, an associate professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology who was not involved with the study.

Paleontologists discovered the fossil remains of Phiomicetus anubis in 2008, during an expedition in Egypt's Fayum Depression — an area famous for sea life fossils, including those of sea cows and whales, dating to the Eocene epoch (56 million to 33.9 million years ago). The expedition was led by study co-researcher Mohamed Sameh Antar, a vertebrate paleontologist with the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, making this the first time that an Arab team has discovered, scientifically described and named a new species of fossil whale, Gohar said.
By analyzing the whale's partial remains — pieces of its skull, jaws, teeth, vertebrae and ribs — the team discovered that the 1,300-pound (600 kilogram) Phiomicetus is the earliest (or most "primitive") whale in Africa from a group of semiaquatic whales known as the protocetids. 
Gohar and colleagues analyzed the fossils in the lab of Hesham Sallam, founder of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center and the study's senior author. The study was published online Wednesday (Aug. 25) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Gohar, Abdullah S.; Antar, Mohammed S.; Boessenecker, Robert W.; Sabry, Dalia A.; El-Sayed, Sanaa; Seiffert, Erik R.; Zalmout, Iyad. S.; Sallam, Hesham M. (25 August 2021). "A new protocetid whale offers clues to biogeography and feeding ecology in early cetacean evolution". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 288 (1957). doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.1368.

A semiaquatic whale lived 43 million years ago named it after Anubis, the Egyptian god of death.

A description of a new amphibious whale fossils (MUVP500) from the middle Eocene of the Fayum Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt. 

A new amphibious whale from Egypt_SVP2020.mp3

عبد الله جوهر - Abdullah Gohar



Abdullah Gohar

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