by Tim Flannery
17 million years ago Gryphopiths (ancestors of orangs, gorillas, chimps and humans) evolve in Europe.
13 million years ago Nacholapithecus (last ancestor of orangs, gorillas, chimps and humans) evolves in Africa.
11 million years ago Hispanopithecus (ancestor of gorillas, chimps and humans) evolves in Europe.
7 million years ago Graecopithecus, the earliest ancestor of the human lineage, evolves in Europe.
6 million years ago Orrorin, our direct ancestor, evolves in Africa.
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* The creature was named in honour of the Catalan palaeontologist Miquel Crusafonti i Pairó, who spent a lifetime studying the Miocene mammals of Iberia.
* The Ouranopithecus-like creature has been named Nakalipithecus, and is known from a jawbone and 11 isolated teeth.
** The specimen was housed in the Freyberg Museum.
CHAPTER 19
Lakes and Islands
Between about 11 and nine million years ago, mass migrations were transforming the faunas of Europe’s fresh waters. The best place to see what happened is in sediments preserved around the ancient lakes of eastern and central Europe, including Lake Pannon. These extensive fresh waters allowed many new kinds of fish to colonise Europe, almost all of which came from Asia, which led to today’s exceptionally rich faunas of the Danube catchment.1
Europe has about 600 species of freshwater fish, and 50 per cent of them belong to a single family, the Cyprinidae, which includes the carp, tench and minnows among others. Most of Europe’s old, endemic species of freshwater fish are found in southern Europe, the northern European fauna having been destroyed by advancing ice, only to be re-colonised from the south following each ice age.
A remarkable survivor can be found in the southern Carpathians of Romania. Romanichthys, commonly known as the Romanian darter, is a very primitive cyprinid which has two dorsal fins and a covering of rough scales. Its discovery in 1957, in the upper reaches of the Varges River, caused ripples of surprise in the world of ichthyology. The development of hydroelectric dams has since had a severe impact on Romanichthys. It may survive in a single tributary of the Varges, but, without help, time is running out for this ancient Romanian.
Today, European waters are home to eight of the world’s 27 species of sturgeons. They are an ancient breed of fish with a history going back more than 200 million years. Their fossil record, however, is so elusive that it’s unclear just when they arrived in European waters. But they are adapted to life in lakes, and today the greatest diversity of sturgeon species occurs in the Caspian Sea on Europe’s eastern border, where six species coexist. It’s fair to assume that the ancestors of Europe’s species arrived via Lake Pannon.
The beluga fish (not the whale) is the largest sturgeon, in times past reportedly reaching lengths of 5.5 metres and weights of 2000 kilograms in the Caspian Sea, making it one of the largest fish on Earth.2 All sturgeon species are long-lived, some surviving for more than a century and taking 20 years to reach sexual maturity. They are, in effect, megafauna, and as for all of Europe’s megafauna, they have fared badly on an ever more intensely populated continent. Illegal fishing continues to pillage the only viable sturgeon population left in the EU—in the lower reaches of the Danube in Serbia and Romania.
It is now time to turn to Europe’s islands, as well as to one of its last, and perhaps most extraordinary, apes. So, let us enter our time machine and set the dials for the Mediterranean Sea about nine million years ago. Below us, the wine-dark waters are wide, but there is no sign of the Italian peninsula. Instead, two great islands are visible, parts of which will in time be incorporated into mainland Italy. Both have left a rich fossil record.
We land on the lost island of Gargano, a place that existed between 12 and four million years ago, and step out into the balmy air. Before us is a gullied limestone plateau, covered in a mixed vegetation of forest and more open habitats. A shadow passes over us. We look up and see a falcon the size of an eagle swooping to investigate. It disturbs a group of Hoplitomeryx. Rather goat-like in size and shape, they have five horns on their head, one of which springs from between their eyes, giving them a fierce look that is accentuated by the long, sabre-like upper canines. Despite appearances, they are herbivores—a kind of horned deer—and the largest of Gargano’s inhabitants. The remains of five species have been discovered (they may have existed at different times), the largest the size of a red deer.
The startled Hoplitomeryx canter towards a thicket, and an ugly, pig-eyed creature that looks to be all head, rushes out and grabs a fawn, snarling and struggling to subdue its prey. Deinogaleryx is the largest hedgehog ever to exist. One-third of its 60-centimetre length is head, the rest a hairy body with short legs. Its incisors stick out almost horizontally from its ferocious maw, while its tiny eyes give it a particularly vicious aspect. In the absence of cats and other carnivores, evolution has recruited this most unlikely creature to be Gargano’s top mammalian carnivore. But the titanic hedgehog was not the only predator of ancient Gargano. Had we time to explore further we might see a gigantic barn owl, which at over a metre tall was twice the size of the largest owl living today. Add a giant, flightless goose, an endemic otter, a giant pika (a rabbit-like creature), five species of dormice, some of which were giants, and three gigantic hamsters, and you have a very strange fauna indeed.
The bones of Gargano’s ancient inhabitants were preserved when the island’s limestone plateau eroded into a cavernous formation that trapped and preserved them. Most, if not all, of the island was then submerged and was overlain with a blanket of marine sediments. As the boot-shaped peninsula of Italy took shape, it gave a backwards kick, so to speak, rotating from a position adjacent to Sardinia to one nearer to the eastern Adriatic coast, colliding with the then submerged island of Gargano, and elevating it to about 1000 metres above the sea before fusing it to the Italian peninsula to become the ‘spur’ on the boot.
We return to our time machine and travel west, to Tuscania, the largest island of Miocene Europe. Composed of what today are the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, as well as parts of Tuscany, Tuscania was larger than any modern Mediterranean island. Over the last 50 million years it has been intermittently connected to the European mainland, allowing new species to colonise. By about nine million years ago, however, a prolonged period of isolation led to the development of a most unusual island fauna. Our time machine touches down beside the estuary of a tropical river, on a high dune separating a broad stretch of swamp forest from the sea.
As we step out, herds of small-to-tiny antelopes, clearly belonging to two distinct species, accompanied by a much larger primitive giraffe, browse on the sparse vegetation of the dune.* The larger of the antelope species is the most abundant herbivore on the island, and has distinctive spiral horns. The smaller one, barely the size of a hare, has simpler, curved horns. The giraffe (whose fossils are few) may have resembled a small okapi. In the shallows a dwarf, buffalo-like creature stands, cooling down, accompanied by an Etruscan pig—a small, short-snouted porker.
An unusual ape ambles onto the dune. The gibbon-sized creature is walking upright with an awkward gait, holding in its right hand a broad leaf to protect its head from the sun. It walks towards a clump of mangroves and climbs into the canopy where it feeds on the salty leaves. The Tuscanian ape, Oreopithecus bambolii, is by far the best known of all of Europe’s apes, for entire skeletons were discovered in a lignite mine in Tuscany. They reveal a creature weighing between 30 and 35 kilograms, with long arms, a small, globular cranium and teeth adapted to eating leaves. It was not intelligent, its brain being only half the size of the brains of other early apes.
As its long arms and leafy diet indicate, Oreopithecus was primarily adapted for life in the treetops, moving through the canopy like a gibbon, swinging arm over arm. But that is not the whole story. Its spine is curved in a very distinctive way, and its pelvis is astonishingly human-like, suggesting that it habitually stood uprigh
t. Moreover, each foot has a great toe that sticks out at a 90-degree angle, providing a sturdy tripod on which to balance. Oreopithecus is a mystery hiding in full view: we could hardly want for more skeletal evidence, yet scientists can’t agree on where it lies on our family tree. Was it an upright hominin—and thus on the human lineage—or a more primitive type of ape that independently evolved the ability to stand on two legs?
Oreopithecus was one of Europe’s last apes. Had we arrived on Tuscania around six million years ago and looked northwards, we would have seen a distant shore across the sea. For generation after generation, that shore would have moved imperceptibly closer, bearing its freight of hyenas, sabre-tooths and primitive canids that lurked in the forests behind the beaches of mainland Europe. When shore finally touched shore, the little ape would not have stood a chance.
*
If you have ever visited Monaco, to play at Monte Carlo, perhaps, or watch the grand prix, you may almost have rubbed shoulders with an intriguing American. Not Princess Grace, but Strinati’s cave-salamander—which deserves to be every bit as celebrated and treasured as any actor or head of state. Just 10 centimetres long, of a retiring nature and—strange for a terrestrial organism—lacking lungs, it gets by by breathing through its skin. The skin must be kept moist, which is why it spends most of its life in caves, crevices and other humid places, emerging only at night to feed, using its long, projectile tongue to catch insects and other small creatures, much in the manner of a toad.
The origins of this retiring creature have kept scientists guessing for more than a century. When did its ancestors arrive in the limestone fastness of Monaco, and how did they get there? Strinati’s cave salamander is one of just seven European cave salamanders, four of which are found only on the island of Sardinia, the others being distributed in southwestern France and Italy, San Marino and Monaco. One might say that their fondness for tiny nation states is almost as much of a mystery as their origins.
The family group Plethodontidae, to which the European cave salamanders belong, contains about 450 species, making it the largest of the salamander and newt families. And 98 per cent of its species are restricted to the Americas. All lack lungs, though that handicap seems to have counted for little. In Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri, for example, they are—if you count them by weight—the dominant form of life, with 1400 tonnes of plethodontids lurking in the leaf litter and wetlands of its 600,000 hectares.
Europe’s cave salamanders, scientists agree, must have come from North America. But when, and by which route? Did they, like the amphisbaenids, arrive in the wake of the dinosaur extinction? And did they travel overland, or by sea? Some researchers suspect that they are ancient relics that have survived only by retreating to their subterranean fastnesses. Their distribution—which until recently was thought to include only the Americas and Europe—supported the idea that they must have crossed a land bridge between the two landmasses, perhaps during the age of dinosaurs. But the oldest fossils of the group in Europe, which come from Slovakia (where they no longer occur), date only to the middle Miocene—around 14 million years ago.3
In 2005, a remarkable discovery was announced. An American teacher working in Korea was leading his students on a walk in Chungcheongnam-do when he spotted a salamander in a rocky crevice. He captured the animal and sent it to Dr David Wake, an expert on salamander classification, who proclaimed it ‘the most stunning discovery in the field of herpetology during my lifetime’.4 It was a lungless salamander—the first ever found in Asia. The discovery makes it likely that lungless salamanders arrived in Europe, via Asia, during the Miocene.
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* The precise identity of the ‘giraffe’, Umbriotherium azzarolli, is still disputed, but certain features of its premolars resemble those of primitive giraffes.
Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás, Baron of Sǎcel and discoverer of Europe’s dwarfish dinosaurs, dressed as an Albanian Shqiptar warrior, 1913.
Robert Plot’s 1677 depiction of the first dinosaur bone to be described (middle row, left). Later, the fossil would be named the Scrotum humanum.
A pig-nosed turtle. Once widespread in Europe, today the only surviving species inhabits New Guinea and northern Australia.
A 47-million-year-old fossil shark, nearly two metres long, from Monte Bolca, preserving dark pigment on the fin tips.
Gisortia gigantea, the largest cowrie ever, lived about 50 million years ago in the Tethys Sea.
A fossilised giant bell-clapper shell—one of the largest gastropods ever to live. It thrived in the Paris Basin about 50 million years ago, and today its only surviving relative is found in the waters around southwestern Australia.
A model of a fossil Nummulite. Randolph Kirkpatrick of the British Museum believed that the entire planet was made of fossil Nummulites.
The skeleton of an entelodont. These ‘pigs from hell’ were top predators in Europe 30 million years ago.
The olm, described by Johann Weikhard von Valvasor as ‘a worm and vermin’, is a cave-dwelling amphibian from the Slovenia region.
The skull of a deinothere. These elephants reached Europe from Africa about 16.5 million years ago and thrived there until 2.7 million years ago. Precisely how they used their strange tusks remains a mystery.
The skull of a Hoplitomeryx. These strange deer had up to five horns, and inhabited the now-vanished Mediterranean island of Gargano.
A skeleton of the Tuscanian ape Oreopithecus bambolii. An inhabitant of Sardinia eight million years ago, it appears to have been bipedal.
Sir Richard Owen, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, described the giant viper Laophis in 1857. He was one of the most dastardly scientists ever to live.
A cave bear skeleton. A gigantic vegetarian, with a skull up to three-quarters of a metre long, it was unique to Europe until its extinction 28,000 years ago.
A model of a Neanderthal woman. Constructed in 2014, it can be seen in the Museum of the Confluences, Lyon.
A giant deer. With an antler spread of more than three metres, it was a striking member of the European megafauna. It survived on the Isle of Man until about 9000 years ago.
The lion-person of Hohle Fels, Austria. Carved from ivory about 40,000 years ago, this imaginary hybrid creation is the work of the earliest human–Neanderthal hybrids.
A skull of the now-extinct scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium. This creature could weigh up to 440 kilograms. It survived in Europe until 28,000 years ago.
Konik ponies in the rewilded Oostvaardersplassen, Netherlands. With an area of 60 square kilometres, the Oostvaardersplassen, though managed by people, offers a vision of ice-age Europe.
CHAPTER 20
The Messinian Salinity Crisis
Since the nineteenth century, geologists have known that layers of salt and gypsum exist around the Mediterranean, but until 1961 nobody understood how they got there. In that year a seismic survey was conducted, revealing a layer of salt, in places more than one and a half kilometres thick, below the entire Mediterranean basin. Astonished scientists conducted a drilling program, and a decade later confirmed that the layers of salts and other evaporites could mean only one thing: at some point the Mediterranean Sea had dried out. A research program found that the great drying commenced about six million years ago during the Messinian age, the last stage of the Miocene.* Known as the Messinian salinity crisis, it resulted from the clockwise rotation of Africa, which closed the Strait of Gibraltar and isolated the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean.
You might think that mighty rivers like the Rhône, Nile and Danube that flow into the Mediterranean would prevent the sea drying out, even if it were cut off from the Atlantic. But so great is the amount of water that evaporates each year from the Mediterranean that all of the water brought in by rivers, along with all of the rainfall it receives directly, cannot offset it. In fact, the rivers draining into the Mediterranean bring in only about a tenth of the amount of water lost
through evaporation. The rest of the water deficit is replaced by flows from the Atlantic, which is why a swift current flows through the Strait of Gibraltar. Without this Atlantic water, the level of the Mediterranean Sea would drop at a rate of a metre per year.
When the connection with the Atlantic was blocked, it took just 1000 years for the Mediterranean to dry out, creating a vast salt plain, more than 4000 metres below sea level at its lowest point, dotted with hypersaline lagoons. The Mediterranean’s islands now towered as high as seven kilometres above the salty plain, where temperatures may have reached 80° Celsius—a phenomenon that must have profoundly affected regional atmospheric circulation and rainfall, and precluded all life except bacterial extremophiles.*
The drying of the Mediterranean caused the rivers flowing into the basin to cut deep valleys. For example, the Nile flowed 2.4 kilometres deeper than the level of Cairo, while the Rhône cascaded down a steep slope, creating a valley 900 metres deep below present-day Marseilles. The Mediterranean did not remain continuously dry during the Messsinian crisis: as the climate altered, it partially filled periodically, leaving a series of salty and less salty layers in the sediment. Around 5.3 million years ago, after some 600,000 years, a link with the Atlantic was re-established when rivers draining into the basin cut through the barrier.
Once the ocean water found a way into the basin, it cut a deeper channel, and thus began the so-called Langelian flood, in which the waters of the Mediterranean rose at rates of up to 10 metres a day. Initially, the waters descended the four vertical kilometres to the salty basin floor through a series of cascades that followed a relatively gentle slope. Nonetheless, it must have been an awesome sight that overall would have dwarfed any waterfall existing today. Within a century, the Mediterranean was refilled.
