0000000000987030
AUTHOR
A Savorelli
New insular taxa from the oldest Terre Rosse fissure filling (Gargano, Southeastern Italy).
A rich amount of fossil remains of a highly diversified vertebrate fauna, known as “Mikrotia fauna”, has been retrieved from the red soil deposits (Terre Rosse) which fill the extensive palaeokarst network that affects the Mesozoic limestone along the north-western slopes of Mount Gargano (Southern Italy). The faunal assemblages reveal a rather complex history of bioevents such as dispersals and extinctions, which occurred when the area was isolated. These reconstructions were based on the materials collected during the seventies and the eighties of the last century. Forty years after its discovery, the Gargano Terre Rosse finally yielded evidence of an older faunal settlement. The peculiar…
New surprises from the Gargano Late Miocene small mammals, a neverending story.
Origin of the Elements of the endemic "Terre Rosse" fauna (Gargano, South eastern Italy)
The attention of the scientific community has recently been addressed on various aspects of the Messinian endemic vertebrates from the foreland sector of the Abruzzo - Apulian paleobioprovince: several new papers dealing with ruminants, glirids, insectivores, cricetids, as well as with biochronological, palaeographic and biogeographic aspects have been published in the last ten years. New fossils finds enriched the taxonomic composition of the Gargano endemic fauna: a new Cricetodontinae genus, a new Murinae genus representing the direct ancestor of the endemic murid Mikrotia, and a new species of primitive giant moonrat Deinogalerix. The recently published taxonomic description of the smal…
The Abruzzo-Apulian (Central and Southeastern Italy) fossil fauna, new challenges for paleontologists and paleobiogeographers
The Abruzzo-Apulian Platform was an endemic Neogene paleobioprovince. Its relics can be found at the south-east of the Italian Peninsula. Geological and paleontological traces of this past land crop out both in the central Apennines, Maiella (Scontrone fossiliferous site), as well as in the Gargano Promontory. The Scontrone paleofauna -Scontrone is placed on the southern borderline of the Abruzzo National Park, Central-Southern Apennine. The bone-bearing sediments are coastaltidal-flat calcarenites stratigraphically dated to the Lower Tortonian. They yielded remains of terrestrial mammals, which include the bizarre ruminant Hoplitomeryx and the giant insectivore Deinogalerix, of a large ter…
A new small mammal assemblage from the Pirro 12 “Terre Rosse” fissure filling (Gargano, Southeastern Italy).
The Pirro 12 fissure filling has been discovered and sampled by a team of the University of Torino during the 2005 field survey in the Dell’Erba Quarry (Apricena, Foggia). The occurrence of a very small Deinogalerix and of a very simple Mikrotia supported, at a first glance, the very old position of Pirro 12 in the biochronological succession of endemic faunal settlements of Gargano (Villier, 2011). In this communication the preliminary result of taxonomic studies of the small mammal assemblage of the Pirro 12 filling is presented. The Gliridae is by far the most common family in this site. Two species of the endemic genus Stertomys have been identified: the small-sized Stertomys cf simplex…