A Descriptive Catalogue of Fossils from Wadi Natrun (Mio-Pliocene) Egypt, housed in the Cairo Geological Museum and in Museums in Europe

Fossil vertebrates collected from Wadi Natrun, northeastern Egypt, at various times during the past 120 years are curated at the Cairo Geological Museum and in several museums in Europe, but much of the material in Cairo has never been described. In order to make the latter collection more accessible to colleagues, we present a descriptive catalogue of the fossils, with images, measurements, descriptions and discussions.

Fossil vertebrates collected from Wadi Natrun, northeastern Egypt, at various times during the past 120 years are curated at the Cairo Geological Museum and in several museums in Europe, but much of the material in Cairo has never been described. In order to make the latter collection more accessible to colleagues, we present a descriptive catalogue of the fossils, with images, measurements, descriptions and discussions.The Cairo collection was re-arranged by the authors in January 2010 and is now all together for the first time, having previously been arranged in an ad hoc way as the fossils came into the museum, depending on availability of storage space, which resulted in the fossils being spread through a large number of different drawers. Among the samples are historically important specimens described by C.W. Andrews in 1902. The assemblage at the CGM includes well-preserved fossils attributed to Carnivora, Lagomorpha, Proboscidea, Equidae, Hippopotamidae, Suidae, Camelidae and Bovidae, which, as an assemblage, indicate a latest Miocene to basal Pliocene age (more or less equivalent to European Land Mammal zones MN 13-MN 14).Visits to museums in Europe have led to the 'rediscovery' of fossils from Wadi Natrun described before the 2nd World War by Andrews, Stromer, Studer, Tobien and other authors in Munich, Freiburg im Breisgau, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Berne, Basel and London. Many of these fossils were thought to have been lost because the institutions in which they are housed were not always named by the authors. For the convenience of palaeontologists interested in Pliocene African faunas we provide illustrations of most of the specimens in European museums. Among the fossils there are some undescribed specimens, so we provide succinct descriptions, measurements where necessary and illustrations.