The fayum primate forest revisited

Abstract

The Faywn Prim.ate Forest RevisitedIn Oligocene times, the Fayum area of northern Egypt was a subtropical to tropical lowland coastal plain with damp soils and seasonal rainfall that supported an abundance and variety of vegetation, including lianes (large vines), tall trees, and possibly mangroves, and a large and varied vertebrate fauna. The Oligocene marine strandline was close by and principal Jebel Qatrani Formation streams were probably brackish several kilometers inland due to tidal incursions.Sediments of the Jebel Qatrani Formation were deposited by several large meandering streams, associated with minor but sometimes extensive flood basin ponds. These rocks provide no evidence for the former existence, in early Tertiary time, of a "Proto-Nile" River. Large accumulations of silicified fossil logs in the Jebel Qatrani Formation are autochthonous and the logs were transported only a short distance before burial. The Oligocene higher primates A·~g;Ptopithecus, Propliopithecus, Parapithecus, and Apidium lived in this paleoenvironment and postcranial remains of Aeg;ptopithecus and Apidium demonstrate that these animals were arboreal. This scenario for the paleoenvironment of the Fayum area in Oligocene times differs greatly from the nearly treeless, sparsely vegetated, semiarid sahtlien Oligocene Fayum paleoenvironment populated by terrestrial primates that ,vas recently proposed by Kortlandt (1980).

The reciprocal interaction of angiosperm evolution and tetrapod herbivory

“…Ten species of angiosperm wood were reported from probable lower Paleocene marginal marine sediments in Niger (Koeniguer, 1971), but the oldest diverse flora of large angiosperm trunks is from the early Eocene of Wyoming, U.S.A. (Wheeler et al, 1977(Wheeler et al, , 1978. Among many diverse assemblages of large angiosperm trunks in the later Tertiary are those from the Oligocene of Egypt (Kr~iusel, 1939;Bown et al, 1982), and the Miocene of the northwestern U.S.A. (Prakash and Barghoorn, 1961).…”

Paleoenvironment of the Earliest Hominoids: New Evidence from the Oligocene Avifauna of Egypt

“…These arguments were vitiated by Bown et al (8) based on evidence from Iitholog\', sedimentology, fossils of plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates, and finally from the structural adaptations of the primates themselves. They concluded that the Jebel Qatrani Formation was deposited near the coastline of the Tethyian seaway with interdigitating habitats of estuarinc mangroves, fresh and brackish fluviatile swamps, and forested floodplains flourishing in a climate "typified by adequate, though probablv seasonal rainfall" (8).…”

“…Snow does not report any osprey specimens from this area, but there are sight and breeding records for ospreys from the Ugandan shore of Lake Victoria {17, 18). The only species absent from this area are the flamingos, which require shallow bodies of saline or brackish water, although flamingos do occur in the rift systems that flank Lake Victoria on the east and west, and esmarine environments probably suitable for modern-type flamingos occurred near the site of deposition of the Fayum fossils {6, 8).…”

Discovery of two additional prosimian primate families (Omomyidae, Lorisidae) in the African Oligocene

“…The central geographic position of the Fayum of Egypt with respect to modern lorisiform distribution underscores the likelihood that the region played an important role in early lorisoid evolution. The presence in the Fayum of an early representative of both the Lorisidae and Tarsiidae, the only two prosimian families still extant in Asia, adds to the evidence indicating faunal and floral similarities between the Oligocene Fayum and modern South Asia, as documented also by plants such as the liane Epipremnum, and the crocodilian Tomistoma (Bown et al, 1982).…”