After 40 million years to be discovered “Get to know about the forgotten continent”

A new study has found that the low-lying continent that existed about 40 million years ago and was home to exotic animals "paved the way" for Asian mammals to colonize southern Europe.

This forgotten continent lies between Europe, Africa and Asia, and this forgotten continent - which researchers dubbed "Balkanatolia" - became a gateway between Asia and Europe when the sea level fell and a land bridge was formed about 34 million years ago.

"When and how the first wave of Asian mammals reached southeastern Europe remains poorly understood," paleogeologist Alexis Licht and colleagues wrote in their new study. But the result was exciting. About 34 million years ago, at the end of the Eocene, large numbers of native mammals disappeared from Western Europe with the emergence of new Asian mammals, in a sudden extinction event now known as the Grande Coupure.

However, recent fossil discoveries in the Balkans have upended this timeline, pointing to an "alien" biome that appears to have enabled Asian mammals to colonize southeastern Europe by 5 to 10 million years before the Great

Reversal . Alami and colleagues re-examine evidence from all known fossil sites in the region, covering the present-day Balkan Peninsula and Anatolia, the westernmost outcrop of Asia.

The age of these sites was revised based on current geological data, and the team reconstructed ancient geographic changes that occurred in the area, which has a "complex history of accidental sinking and re-emergence". What they found suggested that the Balkantolia region served as a springboard for animals to move from Asia to Western Europe, with the transformation of the ancient land mass from a free-standing continent into a land bridge - and subsequent invasion with Asian mammals - coinciding with some "dramatic paleogeographical changes".

About 50 million years ago, Balkanolia was an isolated archipelago, separated from neighboring continents, where a unique group of animals flourished different from those of Europe and East Asia, according to the analysis.

Then a combination of lower sea levels, growing Antarctic ice sheets and tectonic shifts linked the Balkans to Western Europe, 40 to 34 million years ago.

The fossil record showed that this allowed Asian mammals including rodents and four-hoofed mammals (also known as ungulates) to venture westward and invade the Balkans.

In addition to this record, Licht and colleagues also discovered jawbone fragments belonging to a rhinoceros-like animal at a new fossil site in Turkey, dating from about 38 to 35 million years ago.

The fossil is arguably the oldest Asian-like ungulate discovered in Anatolia so far, and predates the Great Solstice by at least 1.5 million years, indicating that Asian mammals were on their way to Europe via the Balkans.

Perhaps this southern route to Europe through the Balkans was more suitable for adventurous animals than crossing the higher-latitude routes through Central Asia which at that time were drier, colder, desert steppes, Licht and colleagues suggest.

However, they note in their paper that "the prior association between individual Balkans islands and the existence of this Southern Dispersal Route is still debated".

However, the fossil record of island-dwelling mammals and other vertebrates is usually sparse and incomplete, while the rich Balkantolia fossil record "provides a unique opportunity to document the evolution and extinction of island organisms in deep time," the team concludes.

The study was published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews.