In January, 1907, a small party of museum scientists boarded an ocean liner in New York Harbor and sailed for Egypt. They were off to seek fossils of ancient mammals that roamed a part of northern Africa now called the Faiyum of Egypt. Once a lush, tropically vegetated, lake, river and swamp, the Faiyum lies nestled between the Nile Valley and the Gebel el Qatrani escarpment leading to the Libyan plateau. Now the area is largely desert -- only a small vestige of the Faiyum's once-huge lake called Moeris and bountiful agricultural area that existed in early human times remains. Fossil proof of the ancient, prehistoric fen and its exotic animal dwellers lies buried beneath the sand.

Fossilized remains from the ancient Faiyum, trees in this case, were first described by A.B. Orlebar in 1845. The first fossil vertebrate discovery made in the Faiyum was of whales by a German geologist named Georg Schweinfurth in 1879. His find was published in 1882. In 1898, with Egypt under British military rule, Egyptian Survey geologist Hugh J.L. Beadnell was sent in to survey the Faiyum and soon found more fossil vertebrates. British Museum of Natural History paleontologist Charles W. Andrews joined Beadnell in 1901 to help make the first extensive fossil collection from the Faiyum. They published their impressive results shortly thereafter and aroused world attention. A German team, led by Stuttgart's Eberhard Fraas and transplanted Austrian-cum-Faiyum-local Richard Markgraf, followed the British in 1905. Now the Americans wanted to have a look, and it was the American Museum of Natural History in New York who chose to do it.

The Faiyum is a huge geological depression that lies below sea level in a basin that begins 20 kilometers west of the Nile Valley and extends into the Western and Libyan desert regions. It contains one of the most complete faunal assemblages of Tertiary mammals known on the African continent. At least 20 orders of mammals are preserved in the Faiyum Depression. Included are ancestral "stock" forms upon which were built the important lineages from which later African mammals flourished. Other forms that constituted evolutionary experiments ended abruptly in the Faiyum without leaving any descendants.

Whatever their nature, these fossils provide key insights into many aspects of mammalian evolution in the Old World. The impressive list of Faiyum fossil vertebrates includes: (1) anthracotheres -- a group of artiodactyl (even-toed ungulates), hippopotamus-like ungulates; (2) arsinöitheres (Order Embrithopoda-extinct) -- large, rhinoceros-like ungulates which have no descendants; (3) creodonts (Order Creodonta) -- archaic, hyaena-like hunters and scavengers who constituted the main predators during the early Tertiary, but which later were replaced by modern carnivores; (4) giant hyracoids (Order Hyracoidea) -- primitive ungulates, some attaining the size of boars whose earliest representatives dated from the Faiyum Oligocene; (5) proboscideans (Order Proboscidea), including ancestral forms that shed light on the evolution of the mastodons and the modern elephants; (6) barytheres (Order Barytheria) -- unusual elephant-like forms that left no descendants (their exact taxonomic position is unknown but they are generally placed closest to the proboscideans); (7) basilosaurs -- ancestral whales with external limbs that link older land-dwelling ungulates to modern cetaceans; (8) sirenians (sea cows) (Order Sirenia), rodents (Rodentia), bats (Chiroptera), jumping shrews (Macroscelidea), insectivores (including the new order Ptolemaiida, Simons and Bown, 1995), marsupials (Diprotodonta), the first known from Africa (Bown and Simons, 1984); and parapithecid, propliopithecid and tarsiid primates including the genera Apidium, Oligopithecus, Parapithecus, Propliopithecus, and Aegyptopithecus, the earliest known ancestors of the extinct dryopithecine apes and ultimately of the living great apes and man (Simons, 1968).

Many of the Faiyum mammals appear to have had an endemic African origin: some of the primate families, the macroscelidid and tenrecoid insectivores, the ptolemaiids, the proboscideans, the arsinoitheres, and possibly the sirenians (Simons and Bown, 1995). The non-mammal fossils include: giant constrictor boöids that were quite possibly the largest ever snakes (Gigantophis) from the mid-Eocene with a length of more than 9 meters, sea snakes (Pterosphernus), a host of turtles, crocodilians (including false reptiles), lizards, sharks and skates, lungfish, teleost (bony) fishes (both pristid and siluroid types), many small birds (Rasmussen & Olsen), and a wide range of plants and trace fossils of social insects (Bown, 1982; Bown & Genise, 1994).

The American Museum's 1907 Faiyum contingent was actually comprised of two parties: the work party of Walter Granger, leader, assisted by George Olsen and a group of native workers to be hired in Egypt; and the escort party of Department of Vertebrate Paleontology curator Henry F. Osborn, his wife and two children. They all reached Egypt on January 23, 1907, and were outfitted in Cairo. They proceeded into the Faiyum by caravan on January 31st, touring first through the pyramid fields along the western banks of the Nile. The Faiyum fossil site was reached on February 5th; Osborn and family stayed there until February 18th. They returned to Cairo after a short visit (February 23-24) in Luxor with American lawyer, businessman and archaeologist Theodore M. Davis (1837-1915), and then sailed back to New York.

Granger and Olsen originally planned to stay in the Faiyum until mid-March and return to New York aboard the S.S. Celtic March 20th. In late February, Granger decided to stay in the Faiyum for another month and break camp April 21st. An eleventh-hour cablegram from Osborn in New York abruptly changed Granger's plans. He and his work party remained in the desert to the very end of May, following which Granger spent another two weeks in a Cairo hospital.

This 1907 expedition was a "first" in the history of American paleontology: fossil-hunters leaving the continental American shores in search of fossils in badlands an ocean's span away. Considerable significance, thus, was attached to the expedition. Direct to the British military-backed governor of Egypt, Lord Cromer (Sir Evelyn Baring), it carried letters of introduction from Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, and Joseph N. Choate, former United States Ambassador to Great Britain and an American Museum trustee.