Newly discovered ancient apex predator had knife-sharp teeth and bone-crushing jaws

As It Happens6:25Meet the bastetodon, a newly discovered apex predator of ancient Egypt

What had the body of a dog, the face of a cat and jaws powerful enough to potentially crush the bones of an elephant? 

Meet the Bastetodon, a newly discovered species of apex predator, roughly the size of a leopard or a hyena, that roamed the lush forests of ancient Egypt some 30 million years ago.

"It is really the king of the ancient forests," Shorouq Al-Ashqar, a palaeontologist at Mansoura University and the American University in Cairo, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

Al-Ashqar is the lead author of a new study identifying the species based on an analysis of a remarkably intact skull discovered in the Egyptian desert. The findings were published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

'Like it died yesterday'

Researchers unearthed the skull in 2020 during an expedition to the Fayum Depression, an archeologically rich site in Egypt's western deserts.

For days, the scientists meticulously excavated layers of rock, when suddenly, team member Belal Salem, who is now with Ohio University, noticed a large set of teeth sticking out of the ground.

Salem "shouted excitedly" to the rest of the team to come look, says Al-Ashqar. 

"That was a moment," she said.

When she first laid eyes on the fossil,  Al-Ashqar says she was blown away. It was almost perfectly intact, save for a few cracks, "like it died yesterday."

"For any paleontologist to find a three-dimensional skull … or  fossil, it's very rare because it's buried under the rocks for millions of millions of years," she said. 

After analyzing the skull, and comparing it with other fossils on record, the team determined it belonged to an extinct order of mammals called hyaenodonta — fearsome carnivores who evolved before modern-day cats, dogs and hyenas.

Because of its cat-like teeth structure, the team decided to call it Bastetodon, after the cat-headed ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet, who symbolizes protection, pleasure, and good health.

The researchers also compared the fossil to that of another lion-sized species of hyaenodonta discovered in Fayum more than 120 years ago, which they have dubbed Sekhmetops, after Sekhmet, the lion-headed Egyptian goddess of wrath and war.

"We are super proud of our ancient Egyptian history," Al-Ashqar said. 

While Sekhmetops was originally believed to have originated in Europe, the team concluded both it and Bastetodon came from Africa before spreading to Asia, Europe, India, and North America. 

What did it eat?

Hans Larsson, a Canadian paleontologist who was not involved in the study, called it "pretty cool."

"It's a remarkably complete specimen from a time and place where such complete fossils are incredibly rare," Larsson, curator of vertebrate paleontology at McGill University in Montreal, said in an email. 

Larsson says he wonders what kind of impact the Bastetodon would have had on the food chain. 

"The presence of Bastetodon must have had implications for the complexity of the ecosystem to be able to support such a large carnivore," he said. "This 'top dog' in the food chain must have had an equally impressive diet."

Al-Ashqar suspects it preyed on primates, early hippos and early elephants, all of which have been found on the fossil record for that time. 

While it only weighed roughly 27 kilograms, its knife-like teeth, powerful jaws and sheer strength meant it could take down large animals, and would not have had any predators of its own. 

"They were really, really fearsome animals," she said. 

But if hyaenodonta were so tough, why did they die out? That's a matter of debate among scientists, Al-Ashqar said.

Some theorize a changing climate and dying vegetation reduced the availability of prey and caused them to perish. The desert where the skull was found, for example, was once a lush rainforest.

Others, she says, believe they were wiped out when they were forced to compete with the ancestors of modern cats, dogs and hyenas, which arrived in Africa when tectonic shifts changed the shape of Earth's continents.

Whatever happened to them, she says studying fossils in places like Fayum helps scientists understand how animals adapted — or, in this case, failed to adapt — to huge global changes.

"When we study the impact of climate change and the ecological pressures on the past animals, we can know or have a scenario about what would happen for our ecosystem, or for us as humans in the ecosystem," she said.