Modern ecosystems are under pressure from climate change. The effects of rising temperatures are particularly clear in marine settings, with impacts ranging from coral bleaching to the shifting of species ranges. With the future consequences of such changes unclear, scientists look to the geological record to gauge how major alterations in climate influence the biosphere.
The Valley of Whales or Wadi El-Hitan has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005. The valley is located northwest of the Fayum Depression, north of the Western Desert of Egypt, and preserves the richest marine mammal-bearing Paleogene exposures in Egypt, if not the entire Afro-Arabian landmass, with a remarkable collection of Eocene fossil whales from which it derives its name.
The ~37 million-year-old fossil site Birket Qarun Locality 2 (BQ-2) was discovered in the year 2000 and was worked continuously (in 2001-2002 with Leakey Foundation support) until 2012 by a team from Duke University and Stony Brook University that operated in the Fayum area in collaboration with the Egyptian Geological Museum.
The fossiliferous sedimentary deposits exposed north of Birket Qarun in the Fayum Depression, northeast Egypt, have produced a remarkable collection of fossil mammals from localities that range in age from earliest late Eocene (~37 Ma, early Priabonian) to latest early Oligocene (~29 Ma, late Rupelian).
The Cenomanian Bahariya Formation has produced a remarkable collection of fossil vertebrates including the largest meat-eating dinosaur, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Unfortunately, The Egyptian dinosaur specimens have been shipped to Germany and destroyed in World War II in bombing the Munich Museum of Natural history.
The Late Cretaceous is a time of critical importance for our understanding of vertebrate evolution because it marked the final phase of non-avian dinosaur evolution, and was likely the interval during which the last common ancestor of all living placental mammals appeared.