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‘Top apex’ predator evolved in aftermath of dinosaur extinction In a nutshell * Scientists have discovered a remarkably complete skull of a new prehistoric carnivore species in Egypt’s Fayum Depression, named Bastetodon syrtos, which lived about 30 million years ago and was roughly the size of a modern leopard * The discovery has led researchers to correct a century-old misclassification of ancient African predators, showing they evolved separately from their European relatives rather than being part of the same group * The fossil comes from a crucial time period when Earth’s climate was changing from warm to cool, helping scientists...

...in 1992, a young American graduate student, John Coleman Darnell, and his wife and fellow graduate student, Deborah, decided to take a very different tack. The couple began trekking ancient desert roads and caravan tracks along what they called "the final frontier of Egyptology." Today, John Darnell, an Egyptologist in Yale's Near Eastern Languages and Civilization department, and his team have succeeded in doing what most Egyptologists merely dream of: discovering a lost pharaonic city of administrative buildings, military housing, small industries, and artisan workshops. Says Darnell, of a find that promises to rewrite a major chapter in ancient Egyptian...

A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt's Fayyum oasis, the supreme council of antiquities said. "An electro-magnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said. The remnants of the city are "still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course," Mr Hawwas said. "The artefacts consist of the remains of walls and...