All six known specimens of the early hominid Sahelanthropus tchadensis come from Toros-Menalla site 266 (TM 266), a single locality in the Djurab Desert, northern Chad, central Africa. Here we present a preliminary analysis of the palaeontological and palaeoecological context of these finds. The rich fauna from TM 266 includes a significant aquatic component such as fish, crocodiles and amphibious mammals, alongside animals associated with gallery forest and savannah, such as primates, rodents, elephants, equids and bovids. The fauna suggests a biochronological age between 6 and 7 million years. Taken together with the sedimentological evidence, the fauna suggests that S. tchadensis lived close to a lake, but not far from a sandy desert, perhaps the oldest record of desert conditions in the Neogene of northern central Africa.
Two groups of flightless ratite birds existed in New Zealand during the Pleistocene: the kiwis and the moas. The latter are now extinct but formerly included 11 species. We have enzymatically amplified and sequenced approximately 400 base pairs of the mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene from bones and soft tissue remains of four species of moas as well as eight other species of ratite birds and a tinamou. Contrary to expectation, the phylogenetic analysis shows that the kiwis are more closely related to Australian and African ratites than to the moas. Thus, New Zealand probably was colonized twice by ancestors of ratite birds.
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