Camelus concordiae

Camelus concordiae, the lesser Syrian camel, is an extinct Old World camel of the genus Camelus, the genus that also holds the living Bactrian camel, wild Bactrian camel and dromedary. It is known only from the site of Hummal in the El Kowm Basin of central Syria, where its remains turned up beside Middle Paleolithic stone tools, which suggests an age of roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years. It was a little smaller than a dromedary, with an estimated weight of 300 to 600 kilograms, and had a comparatively small, long head. Its relationship to the dromedary is unclear: the shape of its bones points to a close kinship, yet the differences were judged large enough to treat it as a separate species. It shared the dry steppe of El Kowm with the much larger giant Syrian camel, Camelus moreli. The species was named in a 2019 study by Pietro Martini and colleagues, drawn from his University of Basel doctoral thesis, and the epithet means peace or harmony, a wish for an end to the Syrian civil war that was under way at the time.