The Sahara Desert, 50+ million years ago

[Halichoeres]

Well, it wasn't a desert, but a shallow sea, for most of the interval spanning the end-Cretaceous, the Paleocene, and the Eocene. This paper reviews the things that lived in the Malian Sahara during that time, which included some real giants, like the 9-meter sea snake Palaeophis.

Here's a nice tableau by Carl Buell, commissioned for the occasion:

Pictured:
a stem-group elephant
Acleistochelys (the turtle)
Cretalamna (also sometimes spelled Cretolamna, the shark)
Lavocatodus (the lungfish)
Maliamia (the bowfin)
Myliobatis (the ray)
Palaeophis (the sea snake)
Pycnodus (the colorful fishes)
Rhabdognathus (the crocodile)

Open access at Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History: http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6950

And a blog post teasing the findings: https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/research-posts/sea-snakes-catfish-sahara

[SBell]

That's crazy. And looking at the faunal list, it's even more diverse! So much fish!

[Halichoeres]

That's crazy. And looking at the faunal list, it's even more diverse! So much fish!

Oh yeah, it's huge.