A few years ago, Abdullah Gohar’s mother introduced him to a ghost. That’s how she phrased it, and at first, Gohar was confused. “What are you talking about?” he recalls asking her. But he was also intrigued: She wasn’t alluding to seances and ectoplasm, but rather prehistoric bones, toes from an ancient elephant that had trundled through their neighborhood millions of years before. Gohar grew up near Egypt’s Fayum Depression, a basin southwest of Cairo that’s studded with the remains of prehistoric life, and the fossils got him thinking. He…
