Small vertebrates from Khasm El-Raqaba, late Middle Miocene, Eastern Desert, Egypt

Abstract

Khasm El-Raqaba (KER) (28.451°N, 31.834°E) is a large commercial limestone quarry in Egypt's Eastern Desert. The site is best known for cetacean fossils recovered from middle Eocene deposits, but remains of some geologically younger, small fossil vertebrates representing snakes, rodents and bats, have been recovered from karst fissure-fill deposits intrusive into the Eocene limestones. Comparisons with extant and extinct material reveal that the KER snakes represent two different colubrines, the rodents are referable to the ctenodactylid Africanomys, and the bats represent a new species of Hipposideros (Pseudorhinolophus). Together, faunal correlation and geological evidence are in broad agreement with a late Middle Miocene age for this KER fauna, and a palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of mixed subtropical and more arid microhabitats.

Keywords::

• snakes
• rodents
• bats
• Neogene
• North Africa
• limestone

Acknowledgements

We thank Yuri Kimura for the invitation to take part in this volume honouring Yuki Tomida for his long and distinguished career in vertebrate palaeontology. We thank the Government of Egypt for the permission to work at KER, and Colonel Yasser and his team in Al Minya for their professionalism and good will. We greatly appreciate the assistance of H.I. Lotfy for helping to locate the original KER site, and the help of Y. Attia, F. al-Bedawi, S. Sameeh, M. Hamdan and Desert Tiger with field work and logistics. We are indebted to R. López Antoñanzas (University of Manchester) for comments on our ctenodactylines (including permission to cite her comments here) and sharing her extensive knowledge of the group. L. Marivaux (University of Montpellier 2) generously provided photographs of A. minor from Pataniak 6, Morocco, for comparison, and D. Winkler (Southern Methodist University, Dallas) helped with photography of the KER rodents. We thank N.B. Simmons (American Museum of Natural History, New York), L. Heaney (Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago) and G. Storch and K. Krohmann (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt) for access to comparative specimens of hipposiderines. M.D. Walters (Duke University) provided access to the scanning electron microscope at SMIF and D. Boyer (Duke University) allowed use of the Leica DVM5000 digital microscope facility in his laboratory for photography. This is Duke Lemur Center publication number 1282.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by National Geographic Society grants to P.D. Gingerich [grant number #7226-04] and E.R. Miller, G.F. Gunnell, W.J. Sanders, and A.N. El-Barkooky [grant number #8470-08].