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"Sakal, Ferhan"
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High abundance of Early Miocene sea cows from Qatar shows repeated evolution of seagrass ecosystem engineers in Eastern Tethys
Coastal ecosystems that include seagrasses are potential carbon sinks that require strategic conservation of top trophic consumers, such as dugongs, to maintain their function. It is unclear, however, how long seagrass ecosystems have persisted in geologic time because their fossil record is poor, although the record of their associated vertebrate consumers offers useful proxies. Here we describe an area of dense Early Miocene dugongid remains from Qatar. We documented over 172 sites in <1 km
from one stratigraphic level, including material representing a new species of fossil dugongine dugongid. This taxon is unrelated to coeval Early Miocene dugongids from India and the Eastern Tethys and it is distantly related to extant dugongs, which occupy seagrass habitats of the Persian or Arabian Gulf (hereafter 'Gulf') today. The monodominant assemblage in this area likely reflects a single fossil dugongid taxon and matches the ecological diversity and geospatial distribution of modern-day live-dead assemblages in the Gulf. This fossil site from Qatar shows that the Gulf has repeatedly evolved sea cow communities with different taxa over the past 20 million years and coincides with an Early Miocene marine biodiversity hotspot in Arabia, prior to its eastward shift to the Indo-Australian Archipelago where dugongs continue to thrive today.
Journal Article
Production and provenance of Gulf wares unearthed in the Old Doha Rescue Excavations Project
In this paper, a science-based study of ceramic wares discovered in the Old Doha Rescue Excavations (ODRE) is presented. The ODRE project, run by Qatar Museums and UCL Qatar, discovered a stratigraphic sequence running from the earliest occupation of Doha in the early nineteenth century until the most recent archaeological levels. A strategic selection of ceramic wares from this sequence was studied to shed light on the technological background and provenance of the pottery utilized in Doha between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The petrographic study of these wares has provided insight into their mineralogical and petrological composition and their textural characteristics. The textural elements have been used to understand the technology of production of the ceramics, which come from different places around the Gulf. The identification of components has moved us a step closer to the location of places of production by matching compositions and geological backgrounds. The study of glazes with hhXRF, SEM-EDS, and optical microscopy has given us further insight on technological processes in the application of glaze. Finally, a comparison between the macroscopic and microscopic analyses carried out has been produced to shed some light on the inherent difficulties associated with the identification of wares in Gulf ceramics.
Journal Article