The Fayum Depression
An Egyptian badland preserves the forest where anthropoid primates and early elephants lived side by side.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 3 million years
- Known to
- ± 1 million years
- Era
- Eocene, Cenozoic
The Jebel Qatrani beds west of the Nile record a late Eocene and Oligocene coastal forest with rivers, swamps and mangroves. They have yielded at least seventeen genera of fossil primates — the richest early anthropoid record anywhere — alongside early proboscideans, hyraxes, bats, rodents and the whales of the adjacent sea. Because the sequence spans the Eocene-Oligocene transition continuously, it is one of the few places where the primate and climate records can be read against each other in a single section.