Ardea bennuides
| Ardea bennuides | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
_-_TIMEA.jpg)
Depiction of the bird of death Benu |
||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Ardea bennuides | ||||||||||||
| High , 1977 |
Ardea bennuides is an extinct species of heron from the United Arab Emirates . The species name bennuides refers to the ancient Egyptian god of the dead Benu .
features
Ardea bennuides is only known from a tibiotarsus fragment that was found in the excavation site Umm an-Nar in the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and formally described in 1977 by the Danish geologist Ella Hoch . The stratigraphic age of the fragment is dated to 3050 BC. Dated BC (5000 y BP ). Hoch's description consists only of a short summary and does not give any information about the size of the bone or the exact location. Even so, this description does not count as a noun nudum , as a photo of the bone was published. Ardea bennuides was larger than the Goliath heron ( Ardea goliath ), the largest recent species of heron.
It is highly believed that Ardea bennuides was the inspiration for the Benu, a bird of death depicted on numerous hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt .
literature
- Ella Hoch: Reflections on prehistoric life at Umm al-Nar (Trucial Oman) based on faunal remains from the third millennium BC. In M. Taddei (Ed.): South Asian Archeology 1977. Vol. 1. Naples, Istituto Universitario Orientale Seminario di Studi Asiatici Series Minor 6, 1979, 589-638.
- Zygmunt Bocheński : History of herons of the Western Palaearctic . In: Acta zoologica cracoviensia 38, 1995, 343-362.
- DT Potts: Before the Emirates: an Archaeological and Historical Account of Developments in the Region c. 5000 BC to 676 AD (PDF; 712 kB) 2001. Retrieved on May 12, 2013.