Reporter's Note: See ancient whales in the Sahara Desert

Fayoum, Egypt, Xinhua News Agency, October 6 -- Reporter's Note: Watching ancient whales in the Sahara Desert

Xinhua News Agency reporter Zheng Karen

The evolution of species, the change of land and sea... The dry concepts in these textbooks are vividly illustrated in the Whale Valley of Egypt, a world natural heritage site in the Sahara Desert: a complete whale fossil nearly 20 meters long is scattered in the yellow sand, as if telling a story spanning 40 million years.

Located about 150 kilometers southwest of Cairo, Egypt's capital, whale valley is surrounded by endless desert on three sides, connected only to the Fayoum oasis by a potholed road. Wind and sand erode all year round, the boundaries between roads and deserts are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, and occasionally there are road signs with stones to remind drivers that vehicles are still on the right road. On both sides of the road is a typical Saharan style, dotted with strangely shaped sandstone, and from time to time you can see a swirling desert tornado.

It's hard to imagine that during the Eocene, about 55 to 35 million years ago, this desert was the bottom of the Tethys Ocean. The Tethys Sea, also known as the Ancient Mediterranean Sea, had its southern rim once penetrated deep into today's Sahara Desert, and due to the action of plate movement, the land now known as Africa was constantly moving northward, and the Tethys Ocean contracted accordingly.

During the long period of land and sea, fossils of paleontology buried on the seabed surfaced, and the sediments covering them were then blown away by the wind and sand and discovered by the early 20th century.

After a century of excavations, paleontologists have found nearly 400 whale fossils in the Valley of whales, most of which are Isis Dragon King Whale and Hard Tooth Whale, of which the Dragon King Whale is more than 15 meters long, and the latter is also about 5 meters long. Two species of ancient whales lived between 40 million and 37 million years ago.

Philip King Grych, a professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan, discovered complete fossils of the hard-toothed whale and the Dragon King whale in the Valley of Whales in 1991 and 2005, respectively. Gingerich's team found that the Dragon King Whale has greatly degraded but still legible limbs and has two important characteristics: compared to a large body of more than 15 meters, the limbs less than 1 meter long are not enough to support its walk on the road; the pelvis of the Dragon King Whale is not connected to the vertebrae, which is also different from the usual terrestrial mammals.

In the early 1980s, King Grych discovered the earliest known whale in Pakistan, the Bucky whale that lived about 53 million years ago. He was acutely aware that the fossils of the Dragon King Whale found in Whale Valley showed that the whale species was at a critical moment in the landward journey to the sea: bucky whales, similar in appearance to wolves and foxes and able to walk freely on land, evolved through the transition of the Dragon King Whale into the modern whale we know as the fin-based whale.

After King Grych announced the discovery, UNESCO declared the Valley of the Whales a World Natural Heritage Site in 2005. UNESCO commented that the Valley of whales shows the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals to marine mammals, and that "the number, density and integrity of ancient whale fossils in the valley are unique".

Egypt then worked with Italy and other countries to build a visitor center, museum and walkway in the Valley of the Whales, where visitors can see more than 10 whale fossils on open-air exhibitions up close.

At the exit of the Whale Valley Museum, a display board reads: "The fossils here reveal to man the secrets of biological evolution and global change." By preserving these precious natural heritages, humanity will feel the beauty of the earth and life more deeply. ”