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| - On Jan. 5, 2025, a Reddit user posted (archived) a photo to the r/BeAmazed subreddit that showed what appeared to be a giant vertebral column in a desert. The post included a caption reading, "A Whale skeleton found in the hot dunes of Egypt."
That post, which had amassed around 47,000 upvotes at the time of this writing, was not the photo's first appearance online. Posts identifying the image as a photo of a whale skeleton found in Egypt have popped up for years on social media outlets including X (archived), Reddit (archived), and Facebook (archived).
In short, the image is indeed an authentic photo depicting a roughly 37-million-year-old fossilized whale skeleton at Wadi Al-Hitan, a site in Egypt's Western Desert whose Arabic name translates to "Valley of the Whales."
Reverse image searches on Google and TinEye revealed the image was taken by Associated Press photographer Thomas Hartwell. He captured the photo during a January 2016 visit to Wadi Al-Hitan (spelled "Wati El Hitan" in the AP caption), according to information provided by AP Newsroom.
Located about 90 miles southwest of Cairo, Wadi Al-Hitan is a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for its abundance of fossils dating to the middle and late Eocene epoch, roughly 38 million to 36 million years ago, when parts of Egypt were still covered by a prehistoric sea. According to a UNESCO World Heritage Datasheet for Wadi Al-Hitan, "over 400 fossil skeletons of archaic whales and other vertebrates" have been found at the site.
Hartwell visited Wadi Al-Hitan for the unveiling of Egypt's Fossils and Climate Change Museum on Jan. 14, 2016. Various media outlets, including Phys.org and the Daily Mail, used the image in their coverage of the museum's opening.
Snopes also compared the image to numerous photos past visitors to the museum posted on Google Maps and Tripadvisor, as well on Flickr. The same S-shaped vertebral column from Hartwell's photograph could be seen from different angles in numerous traveler snaps. Some of the photos included a museum label reading: "Intact Skeleton of Basilosaurus whale."
(Tripadvisor user Bob W.)
Paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich explained in a Geological Society of London article that Basilosaurus isis is one of two types of archaic whale most commonly found at Wadi Al-Hitan (the other is the much smaller Dorudon atrox). Basilosaurus' fossilized skeletons average between 15 and 18 meters in length (roughly 50 to 60 feet), according to a webpage maintained by the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology.
In an email to Snopes, Gingerich, who has conducted research at Wadi Al-Hitan, confirmed the bones indeed belong to the Basilosaurus isis species, which lived around 37 million years ago.
Because the photo authentically depicted fossilized whale bones that date to the middle or late Eocene epoch and were discovered in Egypt's Wadi Al-Hitan, Snopes rated this claim as true.
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