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Palaeontology

An Asian Grande Coupure

Nature volume 394, page 321 (1998)Cite this article

The more palaeontologists know about mammals from the Cenozoic era (65 million years, Myr BP, to present), the more convinced they are that these fauna have undergone two major turning points in the Northern Hemisphere. The first is marked by the dispersal and subsequent radiation of most modern orders of mammals, within continents, at the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary, 55 Myr BP. The second happened 20 Myr later, around 34 Myr BP, at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary (EOB). This second event has been documented on a much more global scale than the first and, on page 364 of this issue, Meng and McKenna1 add a new cornerstone for understanding it. They give an overview of successive mammalian faunas in Mongolia, from the Palaeocene to the end of the Oligocene, and identify a large-scale extinction — the Mongolian remodelling — which occurred at roughly the same time as the EOB.

The story starts at the beginning of the century when Hans Georg Stehlin2, a Swiss palaeontologist, tried to convince his colleagues at the Société Géologique de France that the EOB, as observed in the marine realm, could also be recognized on land. From his studies of European Palaeogene faunas, he showed that the large herbivores suffered a big break at about the same time as the EOB. This event — which he named the Grande Coupure (the big cut) — corresponds to an extinction/origination event whereby new immigrants of Asian origin replaced most of the (old) endemic Eocene genera of Europe.

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  1. the Laboratoire de Paléontologie, Institut des Sciences de l'Évolution, Université de Montpellier II, place Eugne-Bataillon, 34095 cedex 5, Montpellier, France

    Jean-Louis Hartenberger

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  1. Jean-Louis Hartenberger
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Hartenberger, JL. An Asian Grande Coupure. Nature 394, 321 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/28501

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