The goal of this international collaborative project is to enhance our understanding of North African mammalian and primate evolution. Wadi Moghra, Qattara Depression, Egypt, is an important site for paleontology because of a unique constellation of factors. These include the kinds of animals preserved at Moghra, the age of the locality, and the location of the site in Egypt far from most other early Miocene localities in East Africa. Before the early Miocene, Africa was an island continent with a largely endemic fauna. However, during the early Miocene, Afro-Arabian and Turkish tectonic plates collided resulting in a land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. For the first time in the Cenozoic, a host of new animals, including new primates, carnivores, and hoofed mammals appeared in Africa. Many of these animals, ca. 25 species in 15 families, are preserved as fossils in the rocks at Moghra. The specific goals of the Moghra project are: 1) to complete a comprehensive biostratigraphic plan of the early Miocene of Egypt, by extending previous geological and paleontological work at Moghra to include investigations of newly identified basal Miocene deposits lower in the geological sequence; 2) to strengthen preliminary reconstructions of the paleoenvironment at Moghra, by testing dietary and habitat preference hypotheses derived from occlusal morphology against biochemical analyses (calcium, carbon and oxygen stable isotopes); and 3) to contribute information from Moghra to larger, regional and pan-African interpretations of the transition from archaic faunas and floras (Oligocene and early Miocene) to more modern ones (early and middle Miocene), e.g., the rise of modern African mammals and the spread of grasslands from Eurasia into Africa. This project is co-funded by the SGP and OISE Programs at NSF.
