The Mediterranean was formed as a result of movements in both the Earth and sea beginning back in the second era, around two hundred and twenty million years ago. Violent upheavals have marked its history every since. Up until then, the continents had formed a single island known as Pangea. When they floated apart, a sea was formed. The Greeks later called this sea Tethys, after a goddess born ...

In the past 10 years an abundance of new models aimed at finding a better or even the ultimate solution for the structure and evolution of the Mediterranean Tethys have been published. These models are based on new geophysical (mainly paleomagnetic) results, refined stratigraphic and facies data, and sometimes even on detailed geochemical analyses. They were constructed with the help of paleaog...

Paleogeographical considerations on the development of the Paratethys and the Mediterranean during Oligocene and Miocene are presented in twelve time-slices. Plate tectonic activities and the collision of India with Asia caused the destruction of the Western Tethys Ocean in the Late Eocene. The Mediterranean and the intracontinental Paratethys basins came into existence as new marine realms. In...

To test vicariant speciation hypotheses derived from geological evidence of the closing of the Tethys Sea, we reconstruct phylogenetic relationships of the predominantly fresh-water killifish genus Aphanius using 3263 aligned base pairs of mitochondrial DNA from samples representing 49 populations of 13 species. We use additional 11 cyprinodontid species as outgroup taxa. Genes analysed include...

Based on specimens originally referred to as "Dastilbe minor", a nomem-nudum, we describe a new genus of Chanidae †Nanaichthys longipinnus nov. gen. and sp. which exhibits several diagnostic characters such as the absence of orbitosphenoid and basisphenoid, anteriorly displaced quadrate-mandibular articulation, laterally expanded supraneurals, an acute angle between the preopercular limbs, expa...

The geodynamic evolution of the Western Mediterranean related to closure Ligurian-Tethys ocean is not yet fully resolved. We present a new 3D numerical model double subduction with opposite polarities fostered by inherited segmentation margins and rifting system between Iberia NW Africa. constrained plate kinematic reconstructions assumes that both Alboran-Tethys Algerian-Tethys segments are se...

[1] Flexural modeling of Ithaca Chasma on Tethys suggests that the elastic thickness and the surface heat flux were 5–7 km and 18–30 mW/m respectively, when the feature formed ( 4 Gyr B.P.). Tidal heating is a plausible heat source, suggesting that Tethys’ eccentricity was higher in the past. Depending on Tethys’ internal structure, eccentricities in the range 0.001 to 0.02 are sufficient to ha...

West Carpathian Mesozoic paleogeographic development indicates the effect of a left lateral shift of the Alpine- Carpathian microcontinent along the European shelf since the Early Jurassic. The evolution during Late Triassic/Early Jurassic was controlled by convergence along the border of the Meliata Ocean and by contemporaneous divergence along the Middle Atlantic/Penninic rift. During Mid-Cre...

An inferred ancient episode of heating and deformation on Tethys has been attributed to its passage through a 3:2 resonance with Dione (Chen, E.M.A., Nimmo, F. [2008]. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, 19203). The satellites encounter, and are trapped into, the e-Dione resonance before reaching the e-Tethys resonance, limiting the degree to which Tethys is tidally heated. However, for an initial Dione ec...