The role of new Iberian finds in understanding European Eocene mammalian paleobiogeography
Keywords:
Mammalia, Eocene, Endemism, Dispersal, Iberian PeninsulaAbstract
This paper summarizes the new Eocene mammalian discoveries in western and northeastern Iberia and analyses the paleobiological data they provide towards an understanding of the evolutionary and paleobiogeographic history of the Eocene mammalian faunas across Europe. Fifty-one mammalian taxa, of which nineteen are new, have been identified since the last synthesis on Eocene mammal faunas presented at the Paleogene biochronological congress that took place in Montpellier in 1997. The new taxa consist of eight rodents, three artiodactyls and eight perissodactyls. A period of isolation from the Central European Island, albeit with intermittent faunal exchange with the rest of Europe and with other continents (probably Asia and Africa), most likely caused the endemism of the Eocene mammal faunas of the Iberian Peninsula. Middle and Late Eocene mammalian faunas (mainly primates, rodents and perissodactyls) of the western and central Iberian basins (Duero, Almazán, Oviedo and Miranda-Trebiño Basins) were clearly different from those of the Southern Pyrenean Basins and the rest of Europe. The special paleoecological conditions of western Iberia seem to have been one of the main causes of this faunal differentiation. The Iberian Peninsula could have played an important role as one of the dispersal routes for some Eocene mammal faunas that appeared in the Central European Island during the Middle and Late Eocene through two intra-Eocene faunal turnovers involving immigrations.Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright
The commercial rights of the printed and online versions of Geologica Acta are property of the UB, ICTJA, IDAEA and UAB, and Geologica Acta must be cited for any partial or full reproduction.
The opinions and conclusions stated in each article are the exclusive responsability of the authors and do not necessarily coincide with those of the above mentioned institutions UB, ICTJA, IDAEA and UAB.
Author Rights
Authors retain the copyright on their papers (accepted manuscript, uncorrected proof and published paper) and are authorized to post them on their own Web page or their institutional repositories. In all cases, the complete citation and a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article must be included.
The authors can use excerpts or reproduce illustrations of their papers in other works without prior permission of Geologica Acta provided the source of the paper including the complete citation is fully acknowledged.
Papers are distributed under the Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons License. This license allows others to alter, remix or build upon a paper and the resulting work may be distributed under the same or similar license to this one.