The discovery of an unheard-of continent, hidden by its strange creatures in the sea «Video»
Scientists have discovered, in a new study recently published, a new continent previously unheard of in scientific sources, which was home to exotic animals, and paved the way for the arrival of mammals to Europe.
A new study published by the agency "sputnikn" has found that a low continent existed about 40 million years ago, in which there were exotic animals that scientists considered to have "paved the way" for Asian mammals to spread to southern Europe.
This forgotten continent is located between Europe, Africa and Asia, specifically in the Mediterranean region or its basin around the Balkans, and researchers called it the "Balkantolia", and it was considered 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 is still poorly understood today," paleogeologist Alex Licht and colleagues wrote in their new study, published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews.
But the results of the research were exciting. About 34 million years ago, at the end of the Eocene epoch, large numbers of mammals that had spread to Europe disappeared, to be replaced by new Asian mammals, in a sudden extinction event now known as the "Grand Coupe".
But a newly discovered fossil in the Balkans "turned that timeline", revealing a "strange" biome that "appears" to have enabled Asian mammals to colonize southeastern Europe by 5 to 10 million years before the Great Reversal, according to the article published in the journal Science. Scientific «sciencealert».
Licht of the French National Center for Scientific Research and colleagues re-examined evidence from all known fossil sites in the region, covering the present-day Balkan Peninsula, Anatolia, and far western Asia.
The team reconstructed the ancient geographic changes that occurred in the area, after reviewing the age of these sites based on current geological data, which have a "complex history of accidental sinking and re-emergence".
Scientists found evidence that Balkanolia served as a springboard for animals to move from Asia to Western Europe, with the transformation of an ancient land mass from a free-standing continent into a land bridge, where the subsequent invasion of Asian mammals occurred, coinciding with some "dramatic paleogeographical changes".
About 50 million years ago, the Balkans were an isolated archipelago, separated from neighboring continents, where a unique group of fauna differed from those in Europe and East Asia flourished, then caused lower sea levels, growing Antarctic ice sheets and tectonic shifts. the emergence of this continent.
In their paper, the researchers note, that "the previous connection between individual Balkan islands and the existence of this Southern Dispersal Route is still debated", and that the story compiled so far is "based only on mammalian fossils and a more complete picture of ancient Balkan biodiversity groups".
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