A possible bridge between Adria and Africa: New palaeobiogeographic and stratigraphic constraints on the Mesozoic palaeogeography of the Central Mediterranean area

Post-Gondwana Africa and the vertebrate history of the Angolan Atlantic Coast

“…This African promontory, with remnants remaining today in the Levant as well as in Europe, was covered with extensive warm, shallow, carbonate platforms, home to snakes with legs and the earliest mosasaurs, which were the unobtrusive precursors of the last major radiation of marine diapsids (Polcyn et al, , 2005Rieppel et al, 2003;Tchernov et al, 2000;Jacobs et al, 2005a, b). Rifted portions from the African promontory drifted northward with Gondwanan fossils, ultimately to construct southern Europe (Dal Sasso and Maganuco, 2011;Müller et al, 2001;Stampfli, 2005;Zarcone et al, 2010). Cenozoic compressional forces, generated through collision of northwestern Africa with Europe in the early Paleogene, formed the Atlas Mountains, followed by mid-Cenozoic collision of northeastern Africa with Eurasia, both events having significant biogeographic consequences for the distribution of terrestrial mammals (Gheerbrant, 1990;Kappelman et al, 2003;Rasmussen and Gutierrez, 2009).…”

Large-scale phylogeny of chameleons suggests African origins and Eocene diversification

“…A Malagasy origin for crown-group chameleons would require either (i) that agamids were present on Madagascar in the Late Cretaceous (at the latest), and subsequently became extinct, or (ii) that the original agamidchameleon split occurred in Africa, and then the common ancestor to crown chameleons dispersed from Africa to Madagascar in the Late Cretaceous, but became extinct in Africa. However, given the occurrence of extinct and extant chameleons and agamids in Africa, and high potential for their interchange between Africa and Laurasia throughout the Cretaceous [5,22], an equally plausible scenario is that of an ancestral chamaeleonid lineage in Africa that both dispersed to Madagascar and also radiated within Africa. Previous biogeographic scenarios derived from mitochondrial markers and rough molecular dating suggested that chameleons dispersed over water between 47 and 90 Myr ago [14,15].…”

Paleoenvironmental framework of dinosaur tracksites and other ichnofossils in Early Cretaceous mixed siliciclastic-carbonate deposits in the Neuquén Basin, northern Patagonia (Argentina)

“…Nicosia et al, 2007), British Columbia in Canada (Zonneveld et al, 2001), the Bighorn Basin in USA (Kvale et al, 2001) and the Early Cretaceous of the peri-Adriatic Basin (Sacchi et al, 2009;Petti et al, 2010). Interestingly, in the Mediterranean basins dinosaur tracks have been used as an unequivocal evidence of exposure of carbonate platforms that questioned previous paleogeographic reconstructions between southern Europe and Africa during the Jurassic-Cretaceous (Zarcone et al, 2010). Other records from Triassic carbonate tidal flats are also very common in Europe (Dietrich, 2002(Dietrich, , 2008.…”