Egypt's Wadi Hitan: the mysterious valley of the whales
By Susan Teskey, director and writer, The Mystery of the Walking Whale
Nothing on earth prepares you for what happens on the road from Cairo to Egypt's Western Desert.
After two and a half hours, you are engulfed in a desolate landscape swept by fierce windstorms. Spectacular cliffs and craters, giant boulders and bizarre rock formations emerge from the shifting sands. You have entered a wrinkle in time, a lost world: a vast prehistoric graveyard called Wadi Hitan, the Valley of the Whales.
Abdullah Gohar grew up among its ghosts. His mother told him about the ocean and prehistoric monsters that once existed there. Gohar became a paleontologist. He's returned to Wadi Hitan and now he is telling ghost stories of his own through the bones of ancient whales.
The story of this extraordinary place and its ghosts are featured in The Mystery of the Walking Whale, a new documentary from The Nature of Things.
Wadi Hitan is the largest graveyard of ancient whales on the planet. Fossilized pieces of about 1,000 whales, including complete skeletons, have been uncovered in the 200-square-kilometre area.
These pieces of the past are so accessible they can be easily crushed. "Underneath your feet, everywhere you go, there's fossils," says Hesham Sallam, Egypt's leading prehistoric whale paleontologist. But how did whales end up in a desert?
40 million years ago, Wadi Hitan was covered by a shallow ocean called the Tethys Sea. When climate change lowered sea levels, the ocean dried up and the area became a forest. Another climate change turned it into the vast desert it is today, littered with skeletons.
Wadi Hitan is a portal to prehistory. Ancient whales, sharks, crocodiles, sawfish, turtles, even a primitive elephant have been found here. They are preserved so well that even stomach contents have remained intact. The number, concentration and quality of fossils from this period is unique in the world.
In 2005, UNESCO made Wadi Hitan a World Heritage Site, saying the unprecedented diversity and preservation of its ecosystem allows scientists to "reconstruct prehistoric environmental and ecological conditions."
Evidence of how whales evolved from land-based mammals into ocean-dwelling giants
The Valley of the Whales is ground zero for one of the most iconic stories of evolution on the planet, providing dramatic evidence of how whales evolved from land-based mammals into ocean-dwelling giants.
"Whales are often called the poster child for evolution, because we have such a detailed fossil record, and it happened in only 10 to 12 million years," Mark Uhen, a paleontologist at George Mason University, says in the documentary.
"They undergo this major transformation from living almost exclusively on land, with a little bit of time in the water, to exclusively in the water and not coming out on the land at all."
The Mystery of the Walking Whale brings many of these fossils to life, revealing this extraordinary transition from amphibious walking whales to whales in the final stages of losing their hind limbs.
Egyptian scientists are reclaiming their history
Wadi Hitan's fossil beds were discovered in the early 20th century and for the rest of the century, the site was explored mainly by foreign scientists.
Today, a new generation of Egyptian paleontologists is reclaiming their history. After earning a PhD at Oxford, Sallam set up a paleontology center at Mansoura University in Cairo and has given Egyptian scientists a leading role in the study of the country's fossils.
Abdullah Gohar is among them. He recently headed a team that identified a new species of prehistoric whale. Named after the Egyptian God of Death, Phiomicetus anubis was a ferocious predator that walked on land and swam in the ocean. A crucial "missing link" in the whale's evolutionary journey.
With his Egyptian colleagues, Sallam is unlocking the secrets of the long-hidden world of Wadi Hitan. He recently told Enterprise, "the young generations love natural history and dinosaurs, but don't even know that dinosaurs walked this country [millions of] years ago."
For Gohar, it is a chance to collect more of the ghosts that inhabit this incredible wrinkle in time.
Watch The Mystery of the Walking Whale on CBC Gem.
