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A recent study revealed that the giant sea cow was present about 40 million years ago in the waters of what is now the eastern desert of Egypt.
According to the study, the eastern desert of Egypt was home to the ancient relatives of manatees, that is, manatees, also called sea cows.
A Life Science report reports that this is not the first fossil of extinct creatures, such as the Stellar sea cow, discovered in Egypt, but it is the only known fossil in these special units of rock dating back to the Eocene period, known as the Formation. Beni Suef. Scientists found fossils of Serenia, including some of the creature’s vertebrae, ribs, and limb bones, in 2019.
“He’s almost an adult,” Muhammad Qarani Ismail Abdel-Gawad, professor of vertebrate paleontology and supervisor of the Laboratory of Vertebrate Paleontology at Cairo University, was quoted as saying.
The report notes that, as with whales, the ancestors of mammals like Sirenia lived on land before moving to the sea.
The oldest species of this sea cow, known as Portelli, dates back to Jamaica’s Eocene period, about 50 million years ago.
According to a 2012 post by the University of Michigan Serenia, which provides details of those found in the western desert of Egypt, they had front and rear limbs at the time, like a land creature.
Over time, these herbivorous marine mammals became completely aquatic.
By the late Eocene, all known serenia species had fins on the forelimbs and lost the hindlimbs, according to the University of Michigan Bulletin.
The report says that the discovered fossils contain other evidence indicating that the Eastern Desert was a shallow marine environment at the time. “As they are herbivorous mammals, they used to inhabit coastal marine waters and marine wetlands,” Abdel-Jawad said.
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