Donald Prothero

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Fanged camel named from a century-old museum collection

Co-author of the 2026 camel monograph

For decades, cabinets at the American Museum of Natural History held camel skulls labeled with a name nobody had ever formally published: "Machairocamelus," the knife camel. A monograph uploaded in November 2026 gave the animal a real name, Vampyrocamelus welshi, and a place in an extinct lineage of long-necked, lanky camels.

Updated 2 hours ago

Notable Quotes

"It's seven floors of storage, and each floor is the size of a football field. There's something like 20,000 camel specimens on just one floor."

from Fanged camel named from a century-old museum collection · Updated 2 hours ago

"There are quarries in Nebraska where we get seven or eight different kinds of camels from the same hole in the ground."

from Fanged camel named from a century-old museum collection · Updated 2 hours ago