The Egyptian paleontologist Shorouq al-Ashqar and her team were about to conclude their work in the archaeological site where they worked when they noticed something that caught their attention. As explained by Al-Ashqar, it was teeth of considerable size that stood out from the rock.
Bastetodon Syrtos. The teeth belonged to the fossilized skull of a mammal of about 30 million years old and belonging to a species so far unknown. The team responsible for the finding has cataloged the new species He has given him a name: Bastetodon Syrtos.
The “almost complete” skull found has allowed the team to obtain valuable information about This new species. For example, let’s heal the animal would have had a size similar to that of modern leopards.
B. Syrtos would have belonged to the order of the hyitodontes (Hyaenodonta), an already extinct group of mammals related to that of carnivores (Carnivora), The group in which there are species present such as cats and hyenas. The name Hyaenodonta It makes reference to these animals since, despite not having a direct relationship, the shape of the teeth of the extinct order is similar to that of the teeth of the modern species.
Hypercarnivorous diet. The skull It has even served to get an idea of what this animal ate. The team indicates that B. SyrtosIt would have been what we know as a “hypercarnivore” (this time in a non-taxonomic but strictly food sense), an animal whose diet would have consisted of at least 70% of meat. This species would have been, their discoverers believe, on the cusp of the “food pyramid” in its ecosystem.
The team presented its finding Through an article In the magazine Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Etymology of a name. The choice of name is a wink in the history of the country in which it has been discovered. The Egyptian goddess Bastet embodied, Explain the teamprotection, pleasure and good health. Bastet was represented well as a cat well as an anthropomorphic figure with a feline head, similar to that that members of the newly discovered species could have had. “-Oode,” on the other hand, it is a usual suffix in zoology that means “tooth.”
The fayum. Thanks to its oasis, the fayum is one of the few areas where the water dyes green the land beyond the Nile Valley, which makes it a key region for agriculture in Egypt. But there is another characteristic that makes this environment interesting: its deposits, both archaeological and paleontolocic.
The new finding, in fact, has served to give context to some remains found in the region 120 years ago. From the skull found and fossils discovered in 1904 in the region belonging to hyitodars of a size even larger than that of B. Syrtos. They classify these remains into a different genre to what they have called Sekhmetops.
Bastetodon and Sekhmetops. Until now these animals (whose new name also refers to an Egyptian god, Sekhmet) had been classified in the same group as European hyenodontes. The new classification places the origin of the two new genres, Bastetodonand Sekhmetopsin the African continent itself. According to the new study, these two genres would have expanded in successive waves from Africa to the adjacent continents and even to North America.
Image | Ahmad Morsi
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