The Whale Graveyard

This weekend we took a family trip outside of Cairo to Feyoum, about a two hour drive southwest of the city. Feyoum is a quiet desert oasis, set around a lake surrounded by rock cliffs. Besides the many pottery shops in the quaint village, the main attraction in Feyoum is Wadi Hitan, a paleontological site that boasts the largest collection of prehistoric whale bones in the world. About 40 million years ago, this part of the Sahara was covered by the Tethys inland sea and home to bassilisaurus and durodons, enormous, fanged-toothed, carnivorous whales that were more like sea serpents than whales.