The discovery of a 40 million-year-old lost continent could help solve the mystery surrounding a mass extinction of native Asian mammals.
The lost continent of Balkanatolia was recently rediscovered by researchers from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a group of French, American and Turkish palaeontologists and geologists.
The continent was found to have stretched across where the Balkans and Anatolia are in the present day.
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It has since been suggest the uncovered 'lost' area potentially acted as a corridor for mammals to cross between Europe and Asia, and having possibly triggered an extinction – known as the Grande Coupure – of a series of native species 34 million years ago.
One of the study's co-authors, palaeontologist and professor at the University of Kansas, K. Christopher Beard, explained the mystery which has long-surrounded the native Asian mammals, The Independent reports.
He said: 'People have basically known for decades that Asian mammals invaded Europe somehow. What was unknown was: How did they do it? What route did they take?'
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The discovery of the continent has revealed possible reasons as to why the mammals – of which horses, rodents, and rhinoceroses are distant relatives – travelled from Asia to south Europe.
The Balkan Peninsula is all that is left of the 40 million-year-old continent.
Fossils were located in the peninsula as well as in Turkey, which led to researchers being able to trace the migration routes of the species.
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According to Beard, in the Eocene Epoch – a period dating to 55-34 million years ago – there were 'a lot of animals that had been living in Europe for millions of years and were doing fine'.
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However, the species suddenly went extinct and 'got replaced by mammals that clearly had no ancestral forms in Europe'.
'There were hints that something really weird was going on. Some of the animals that were inhabiting Balkanatolia simply don’t occur anywhere else. And then the combinations of animals living there didn’t live together anywhere else,' he explained.
In researcher's discovery of the Balkanatolia, it was suggested that 50 million years ago the continent had animals unique to it, which were different to those in Europe and Asia.
However, around 40 million years ago, tectonic plates shifted dramatically, ice sheets expanded and sea levels fluctuated amid a major shift in the climate, which resulted in Balkanatolia joining onto Asia and later southern Europe. A large passageway was subsequently formed between the two continents.
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Leader of the study and scientists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Alexis Licht, said: 'At that time, the sea levels dropped by 70 meters [about 230 feet], which is huge.
'This event alone would have created many land bridges, and it’s the main hypothesis to explain the connection between Balkanatolia and Europe.'
Fossils discovered in Turkey suggested the Asian mammals migrated to Europe earlier than first anticipated, as much as five to 10 million years before the Grande Coupure.
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The fossils included jaw fragments from a mammal similar to that of a large rhinoceros, called a Brontotheres. The remains were found to be 35-38 million years old.
Licht noted: 'The site in Turkey helped confirm and validate our hypothesis because this time frame fits everything else we’ve found in the Balkans.'
While many questions have subsequently been answered surrounding the migration of Asian animals into Europe, researchers hope to find even older fossils to go further back in time to discover how the continent first formed.
Beard concluded: 'We have animals on Balkanatolia living side by side that never cohabitate anywhere else on Earth. How did that happen? How did this strange, unique island get assembled?'
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Topics: Science
