Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2019

Nehalaennia, an 8 million-year-old rorqual
from the Netherlands, first described this year

As the year - and decade - approach their inevitable conclusion, it's time again to look back at a few palaeontological findings of 2019 that didn't, for whatever reason, make it into the regular Synapsida posts. As always, there is no theme to this list, just a sample of what seemed interesting linked only by when it happened to be published.

Pliocene (Pt 10): Before There Were Zebras

At the dawn of the Pliocene, Africa, like Europe, was a much wetter place than it is today. As a result, it was also much greener, a place of lusher vegetation, and the animals that fed on it. While that likely made little difference to the heart of the Congo jungle and to the more tropical reaches of West Africa, which are about as green as they're going to get, elsewhere the changes would have be obvious to any putative time traveller.

The biggest difference was likely in the north, where the even the very heart of what is now the Sahara Desert was likely covered in arid scrubland - hardly hospitable, but a significant improvement over baking hot dune-fields. By one estimate, moist savannah and open woodland stretched as far north as 21°, covering what are now countries like Chad, Sudan, and Mauritania. Further east, Somalia would also have been covered by woodland, rather than its current dry grasslands, and, at the opposite end of the continent, there may have been small forests in what are now the Namib Desert and the Kalahari.

It didn't last, of course. Around 3 million years ago, as the world fell irrevocably into the long autumn of the late Pliocene, Africa became not only cooler, but drier. And, if the generally cooler climate did not make too much difference to a continent sitting on the equator, the loss of rain certainly did. It's at this time that the Sahara, and the other deserts we are familiar with today, began to form, and the wildlife had to either adapt to that fact, or die. What was good news for voles in Europe, promoting the tougher grasses on which they thrive, was bad news further south, where the grass gave way to open sand.