First terrestrial small mammal fauna from the Miocene of Bulgaria

Talk delivered in Climate changes, bioevents and geochronology in the Atlantic and Mediterranean over the last 23 Myr.: Joint RCMNS-RCANS Interim Colloquium (Salamanca 21st to 23rd, 2011), Organizers: University of Salamanca, Fundación General USALBulgaria is a dream for vertebrate Palaeontologists. Particularly during the last decade, extremely rich and well preserved large mammal faunas have been excavated and described from Miocene deposits (e.g. Spassov et al. 2006), demonstrating in this way the high potential of the country. In contrast, terrestrial small vertebrate assemblages are almost unknown, the studies being concentrated on the Plio-Pleistocene material (e.g. Popov 2004).Since 2009 intensive Bulgaro-german fieldwork focuses on the discovery of terrestrial small vertebrate-enriched deposits. This effort was successful, and, as a first step, we present here the faunas found in the city of Blagoevgrad (South-West Bulgaria, Struma River Valley). The fossils come from two superposed paleosoils exposed during the construction of a house. The remains are fragmentary, and isolated bones fragment and teeth occur most frequently.The small mammals dominate the sample. All reported genera are new in the Bulgarian fossil record: the rodents Byzantinia sp. and Progonomys cathalai; the insectivores Crusafontina endemica, Desmanella sp. and Schizogalerix sp.; the lagomorph are also present with a form morphologically closed to the Moldavian species Bellatoides kalfense.In a biostratigraphical view, the fauna correlates most probably to the Late Vallesian (Late Miocene), but, because of the lack of precise faunal succession in the region, a more in deep analyze is not possible for the moment. This makes the ongoing discoveries and studies in Bulgaria so fascinating.Peer reviewe