Fossils Help Scientists Identify a 'Lost' Continent
Millions of years ago, a giant island called Balkanatolia shifted and connected Asia to Europe, allowing animals to migrate
Margaret Osborne
Contributor
March 4, 2022
Researchers excavated fossils from a site in Turkey that helped them fill in some of the history of a previously unknown continent called Balkanatolia. Alexis Licht and Grégoire Métais
Millions of years ago, animals from Asia moved into Europe, leading to a mass extinction of native European fauna in an event called the Grande Coupure, or "great break. But how these animals got to Europe has been a long-standing mystery, writes NBC News Denise Chow.
"People have basically known for decades that Asian mammals invaded Europe somehow," K. Christopher Beard, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Kansas, tells NBC. "What was unknown was: How did they do it? What route did they take?"
Now, in a new study in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, an international team of paleontologists from France, the United States and Turkey describe the discovery and history of a continent theyve dubbed "Balkanatolia" that connected Asia, Africa and Europe. The name was made by combining the names of present-day areas that once made up the continentthe Balkans and Anatolia, a peninsula in Turkey also called Asia Minor.
Map showing Balkanatolia 40 million years ago and at the present day Alexis Licht and Grégoire Métais
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discover-a-lost-continent-180979671/