The forgotten continent of Balkanatolia would have served as a bridge for Asian animal species to come to the European continent. This discovery seems to solve what was a missing piece of this time.
“Balkanatolia” is the name of a recently rediscovered terrestrial continent. But you will never be able to stay there: it simply doesn’t exist anymore. The Earth has not always looked like it does today. Continental areas have evolved over the 4 billion years of Earth’s history.
Balkanatolia existed -50 to -30 million years ago, at low altitude, and we find today the geological and paleontological traces in the Balkans and Anatolia – in Turkey in particular. In a study to be published in March 2022 in Earth-Science Reviewsthe researchers who discovered it explain that the Balkanatolia would have played a decisive role in the distribution of certain animal species.
The missing piece to explain the Great Cut 34 million years ago
You have to go back to the Earth of the Eocene, -56 to -34 million years ago. At that time, Western Europe and Eastern Asia formed two very distinct areas separated by water. They do not communicate with each other. Each of these two continents is inhabited by a different biodiversity. In Asia, there was a particularly varied fauna, including a great diversity of mammals which was not then present in Europe. Except that today, we do indeed find these families of mammals in Europe. What happened ?
We know that, towards the end of the Eocene, there was a colonization of the European continent by this fauna from Asia. This colonization caused a great renewal of European species. The European species already present have, for their part, experienced a mass extinction caused by climate change and by this colonization. This event is called the “Great Cut” (or “Great Eocene-Oligocene Cut”, because the period that followed is the Oligocene).
Except that, as often in the exploration of our past, pieces of the puzzle are missing. In this case, the paradox is that we find fossil traces of Asian species on European lands… before the Great Cut. The paleontological evidence therefore suggests that colonization began before this transient event. But how could terrestrial species have crossed the waters? The missing link in this story seems to be Balkanatolia.
The team of paleontologists and geologists behind the new work re-studied collections of fossils from the Eocene, including items unearthed in the 19th century, but re-analyzed against our current geological knowledge. This, until discovering that in the region which today corresponds to the Balkans and Anatolia, there was during the Eocene a terrestrial fauna homogeneous and distinct from Europe and Asia. This unique biome could then only be a separate land mass. For the authors, it was very clearly a continent in its own right, wedged between Europe and Asia: a third Eurasian continent, therefore.
A “bridge” for animals
The discovery does not stop there. When the continent was formed, it was isolated by the seas, which explains its independent biodiversity. But just under 40 million years ago, due to climate change causing glaciation at the poles, sea levels fell and once-submerged land in Balkanatolia became passable. The continent has become a bridge, a land junction, between Europe and Asia.
The consequences of this “bridge” can be seen in the movement of fauna through the fossils. As soon as the traces of a lowering of the level of the seas begin to appear, the paleontologists find, in the current equivalent Balkanatolia, fossils of species coming from Asia. Some of these traces predate by 1.5 million years the famous Great Cut – the mass extinction. Soon enough, therefore, Asian species began to venture into this forgotten continent, eventually arriving in Europe.
