The wood flora of the Cairo Petrified Forest, with five Paleogene new legume records for Egypt

Stable isotopic signatures of the modern land snail Eremina desertorum from a low-latitude (hot) dry desert—A study from the Petrified Forest, New Cairo, Egypt

“…Low altitude predominates, with elevations from 290 to 375 m above sea level (masl). The exposed rock unit in the area known as the late Eocene Maadi Formation is made up of sand, gravel and calcareous shale (Hermina and Lindenberg, 1989), with a large number of silicified tree trunks (El-Saadawi et al, 2011). The soils there are dry, consisting of sand plus minor amounts of clay and carbonate, with minimal organic matter.…”

Terminalioxylon edwardsii from the Oligocene of Egypt, with a review of the genus in Africa

“…Located in the desert hills of Qattamiya, southeast of Cairo and extending for tens of kilometers in the desert towards Suez in the east, the Petrified Forest is a geological protected area comprising only about 7 km 2 between latitudes 29º 58' 30" and 29º 59' 40" N and longitudes 31º 27' 30" and 31º 28' 30" E, found in New Cairo City about 20 km east of Old Cairo and only 1 km from the old toll station on Al-Qattamiya-Al-Sokhna highway (El-Saadawi et al, 2011) (Fig. 1).…”

“…The majority of African plant fossils consists of pollen assemblages and petrified wood (Pan, 2007). To date, about 400 dicot fossil woods have been recorded from Africa (Gros, 1992;Dupéron-Laudoueneix & Dupéron, 1995;Gregory et al, 2009;El-Saadawi et al, 2011;Cantrill et al, 2013); represented in the fossil record from the Cretaceous to the Quaternary. Fossil wood is mostly scattered across North Africa, but in some cases the age and taxonomic affinity may not be well known or are questionable (Pan, 2007).…”

“…The Oligocene dicot wood flora of Africa is represented by 43 taxa, with affinities to fourteen families: Fabaceae (14 species), Combretaceae (six species), Moraceae (five species), Meliaceae (four species), Clusiaceae, Ebenaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Malvaceae (two species each), Fagaceae, Juglandaceae, Monimiaceae, Sapindaceae, Tamaricaceae and Opiliaceae (one species each) (Dupéron-Laudoueneix & Dupéron, 1995;Gregory et al, 2009;El-Saadawi et al, 2011).…”

The fossil wood of East Cairo, Egypt: A mineralogical view

“…1) (Hassan 2015b). This defined area, declared as a natural reserved site by government decree 944/1998, contains fossilized stumps and logs dominated by legume trees (El-Faramawi 2008;El-Saadawi et al 2011). These silicified tree trunks, up to several meters in length, lie horizontally in an exposed section < 100 m thick of the late Eocene sands and gravels of the Maadi Formation (Fig.…”