Maragheh: a classical late Miocene vertebrate locality in norhtwestern Iran

Abstract

The fossil vertebrate localities of the Maragheh region in Azerbaijan, northwestern Iran, are among the most renowned late Miocene localities in Eurasia. The fossiliferous beds are found to the north and east of the town of Maragheh on the southern and eastern slopes of the Sahand massif and at an altitude of 1,450–1,900 m (Fig. 1). The first collection was made by Khanykof in 1840. Subsequent invertigators of the fauna^1–15, established Maragheh as the site of one of the principal ‘Pontian’ mammal faunas of Eurasia. Recently, Tobien¹⁶, Erdbrink et al.¹⁷, Takai et al.¹⁸ and ourselves (the Lake Rezaiyeh Expedition) have concentrated on developing the geochronological and palaeoenvironmental aspects of the Maragheh fauna. The similarity of the Maragheh fauna to those of Samos, Pikermi, Saloniki and Mt Luberon, in particular, was recognized by most workers. The most significant results of the investigations reported here are that the Maragheh fauna spans an extended geochronological range, ∼9.5–7 Myr, that the so-called ‘Pontian’ mammal communities are provincially distributed, and diachronic in their appearance, and finally that the absence of hominoid primates from this site and other late Miocene sites with similar savannah-like faunas strongly suggests their adaptation at this time to more forested environments which existed in Eurasia and Africa before and during the Maragheh interval.