Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments - New: Article collection on The Paleogene rodent faunas from south-east Serbia

The Western and Central European Paleogene mammalian faunal history is relatively well known, and recently data became available from Turkey and sites further afield in Asia. Information from the Balkans is crucial because of its location between Asia and Central Europe. Zoran Marković and Miloš Milivojević (Natural History Museum in Belgrade) discovered the first remains of Paleogene mammals in 2010 in fluvio-lacustrine sediments of the Babušnica-Koritnica basin. The first few rodent teeth from this locality belonged to a hitherto unknown assemblage of probably early Oligocene age. The discovery was followed by reconnaissance and collecting campaigns organised in cooperation with Utrecht University (the Netherlands). Ten localities with small mammal remains were found and sampled in the Paleogene of the Babušnica-Koritnica and the nearby Pčinja basins. The aim of this series of papers is to make information available about the location, geological setting and content of small mammals of these localities. The rodent faunas from these sites show a strong Asiatic character, which is in line with the few large mammals known from upper Eocene and Oligocene localities in the Balkans, but in sharp contrast to the Western and Central European Paleogene rodent associations. Striking in this respect is the presence in the Babušnica-Koritnica basin of the Diatomyidae, a near extinct rodent family so far restricted to central and south-east Asia. The Lazarus taxon Laonastes aenigmamus discovered in 2004 in Laos belongs to this family. 

Location map of the Babušnica-Koritnica and the Pčinja Basins in Serbia. The broken red lines are the boundaries of the Serbian Macedonian Massif.
(From: de Bruijn, H., Marković, Z., Wessels, W. et al. Rodent faunas from the Paleogene of south-east Serbia. Palaeobio Palaeoenv 98, 441–458 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12549-017-0305-0 (this opens in a new tab))