Archaeologists have discovered the 100,000-year-old fossilised remains of a previously unknown giant camel species in Syria.

The bones of the dromedary were unearthed by a Swiss-Syrian team of researchers near the village of El Kowm in the central part of the country.

The animal is thought to have been double the size of a modern-day camel.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6035113.stm

"The camel's shoulders stood three metres high and it was around four metres tall, as big as a giraffe or an elephant. Nobody knew that such a species had existed," he said.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42182000/jpg/_42182195_camel2_letensorer_203.jpg

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42182000/jpg/_42182071_camel_letensorer_203.jpg
Leg bone from a giant camel (l) compared with a modern one

Human remains dating to the same period as the giant camel have also been discovered at the site. The radius (forearm) and tooth have been taken to Switzerland, where they are undergoing anthropological analysis.

"The bone is that of a Homo sapiens, or modern man, but the tooth is extremely archaic, similar to that of a Neanderthal. We don't know yet what it is exactly. Do we have a very old Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal?" said Dr Tensorer.

"We expect to find more bones that would help determine what kind of man it was."

Whoopee! Now there will be instant peace on Earth and goodwill towards all mankind!

Baron Max

That camel was overweight!

But seriously!, fossils of birds and other mammals have been found on remote Pacific islands off the New Zealand coast revealing new species nobody ever knew about.

A new species of dinosaur was discovered by Indian and American scientists a few years ago: a 30-foot (9-meter), horned carnivore that hunted other dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

This camel would have been wild and probably hunted by other animals given that the region at that time would have had more vegetation and variable climate.

It's unusual for an animal to reach that size in warm climates. Thermodynamics selects against it: the ratio of surface area to volume makes it difficult to stay cool. Really huge tropical and subtropical animals tend to regulate their body temperatures by being aquatic like the hippopotamus or evolving a unique way of watering themselves down like the elephant. The woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino, the cave bear... most of the extinct megafauna of the mammalian era lived in the expanded arctic zones of the ice age where conserving body heat was a survival advantage.

I suppose being twice the size of a modern camel only makes it about as massive as a modern rhinoceros, a non-aquatic species that lives comfortably in the tropics. Still it will be interesting to discover more about the ecosystem in which this camel participated.

Syria was not always so desert-like. Besides, what about elephants? Or dinosaurs? Perhaps this fellow was cold-blooded.

Let's clone it!

100,000 years ago the world may have been a few degrees cooler and Syria may not have been a desert, but the world's axis was pretty much in the same place it is today, so Syria was not an arctic or subarctic region where you would expect megafauna to thrive. As I said, elephants have evolved a way to water themselves down with their trunks. They do that frequently. Dinosaurs were reptiles, cold-blooded animals whose metabolism does not generate body heat.

This is an interesting discovery. I also came across the world's smallest camel (http://www.microart.kiev.ua/en/karavan.html) the other day.

100,000 years ago the world may have been a few degrees cooler and Syria may not have been a desert, but the world's axis was pretty much in the same place it is today, so Syria was not an arctic or subarctic region where you would expect megafauna to thrive. As I said, elephants have evolved a way to water themselves down with their trunks. They do that frequently. Dinosaurs were reptiles, cold-blooded animals whose metabolism does not generate body heat.

Dinosaurs weren't reptiles as we know them. They were dinosaurs. They may share phylogenetic similarities with today's reptiles (like the crocodiles) but the reptiles of today aren't representative of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are in the reptile class, sauropsida, but they are distinct from snakes and lizards.

It is most likely they were warm blooded, as their descendents, the avians, are.

Here's a link from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#Warm-bloodedness