Dimitris S. Kostopoulos

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | AUTH · Department of Geology (GGG)

Located at the eastern corner of Mediterranean Europe, Greece occupies a critical position for mammal dispersals to/from Europe, Asia, and Africa and constitutes a potential passageway towards Western Europe. During recent decades, numerous fieldwork campaigns in several Pliocene–Pleistocene sites have greatly enriched the fossil record and provide...

Eurasian Giraffidae went through a drastic biodiversity decline after the Miocene–Pliocene boundary; scanty palaeotragine populations are likely to have survived in Central Asia, providing the necessary stock for a Late Pliocene–Early Pleistocene expansion from Central Asia to Spain and from the Mediterranean to southern Russia. Here, we describe n...

The climatic instability of the Early Pleistocene induced regional paleoenvironmental changes, which impacted faunal composition and dynamics. It coincides with the Homo dispersal out of Africa. The role played by the Eastern Balkans in this dispersal is at the heart of current scientific debates. The rich fossil assemblage of Gerakarou-1 (2-1.8 Ma...

The Early Pleistocene mammal communities of Europe are characterised by a great diversity of large carnivorans. Among them, the largest ever hyaenid, Pachycrocuta brevirostris, a fierce predator with great bone-cracking adaptations that has left its taphonomic signature on several fossiliferous sites. Here, we perform a rigorous taphonomic analysis...

Islands are renowned for their remarkable biotas and have been widely recognised as natural laboratories for the study of evolution, speciation, and extinction. Large mammals in insular environments typically evolve to dwarfs and small ones to giants, a trend known as the island rule. Despite their dominance in the continental European mammal fauna...

Fossil ‘ovibovin’ bovids are described from the Upper Miocene of Çorakyerler (north-central Anatolia). Two taxa have been recognized: the predominant Criotherium argalioides, known by several craniodental remains, and the less common Hezhengia? cf. inundata, documented by a few dentitions. A review of C. argalioides records from Samos and Kemiklite...

NOW ( New and Old Worlds ) is a global database of fossil mammal occurrences, currently containing around 68,000 locality-species entries. The database spans the last 66 million years, with its primary focus on the last 23 million years. Whereas the database contains records from all continents, the main focus and coverage of the database historica...

Pliocene rhinoceros’ bearing fossiliferous localities are very limited in Greece. The rhinocerotid from the locality of Allatini, near Thessaloniki presented here, has long been cited in the literature but has never been studied in detail up to now. This taxon is represented by a single specimen, a radius of a sub adult individual, which is herein...

Located at the eastern corner of Mediterranean Europe, Greece occupies a critical position for mammal dispersals to/from Europe, western Asia and Levant/Africa, and constitutes potential passageway towards western Europe. During the last decades numerous fieldwork campaigns in several sites (e.g., Dafnero, Sesklo, Vatera, Volakas, Libakos, Mygdonia...

Large ungulate limb bones are often used as palaeoenvironmental predictors due to their plasticity in adapting to habitat changes and their abundance in the fossil record. It is often sustained that ungulates with cursorial behaviour undergo to an elongation of the distal limb elements in open environments, whereas larger taxa do not experience thi...

We describe here cranial and dental material of large bovids (Bovidae, Mammalia) from the Upper Miocene fossil site of Dimeh, SW Iran. Six taxa have been recognized: Palaeoryx cf. pallasi, Skoufotragus laticeps, Plesiaddax? sp., Samokeros minotaurus, Tragoportax cf. amalthea and the new species Tragoportax perses. The (i) shortened, rectangularly s...

A new Lower Pleistocene vertebrate site, Krimni-3 (KMN) from Mygdonia Basin, Greece is originally presented herein, providing a preliminary analysis of its taphonomic context and faunal content. The KMN fossil mammal fauna includes the following: Erinaeus sp., Canis sp., Hyaenidae indet., Ursus sp., Equus altidens, Equus sp. (large-sized), Stephano...

The late Villafranchian is one of the pivotal time-spans in the succession of Pleistocene European faunal assemblages, setting the bases for the major faunal renewal that characterized the continent during the Epivillafranchian. Bison is one of the most important and successful large mammals to spread in Europe at the latest stages of the Early Ple...

The Lower Pleistocene Karnezeika locality, lies in the Peloponnese, southern Greece, and its fauna corresponds to the Middle Villafranchian biochronological unit (MN17). The recovered mammal assemblage includes, among others, a few remains of a large Cercopithecid. Herein, we describe this material, including an upper second molar, a partially pres...

In this paper, we present the new Lower Pleistocene vertebrate site Krimni-3 (KMN) in the Mygdonia Basin (Central Macedonia, Greece), one of the most important and richest fossiliferous basins in southeastern Europe. The ongoing since 2019 research at KMN revealed a rather rich and diversified fauna, and the first results on its stratigraphy, fauna...

New finds of Varanus marathonensis (Squamata, Varanidae) from the Lower Pliocene locality of Megalo Emvolon, N.Greece increase its local and European record. Despite the fact that important reptile fossil finds were described already in the 19th century, Greek herpetofauna has been systematically ignored by palaeontologists in Greece until the las...

Unlabelled: Discoveries in recent decades indicate that the large papionin monkeys Paradolipopithecus and Procynocephalus are key members of the Late Pliocene - Early Pleistocene mammalian faunas of Eurasia. However, their taxonomical status, phylogenetic relationships, and ecological profile remain unclear. Here we investigate the two latter aspe...

Τhe functional morphology of the skull of the fossil badger Meles dimitrius from the Early Pleistocene of Greece is studied by means of comparative myological and osteological analyses with the extant representatives of the genus Meles from Europe and Asia. The myological analysis of the masticatory system allowed the reconstruction of a ‘muscle ma...

The study examines the taxonomy of the newly excavated Nyctereutes material from Dafnero-3 (Greece) and the unpublished specimens from Varshets (Bulgaria). One cranium and a hemimandible from Dafnero-3 site are ascribed to the species Nyctereutes megamastoides, already known from Dafnero-1 and other Early Pleistocene sites of Greece. Two additional...

Fossil remains of late Miocene Propotamochoerus Pilgrim, 1925 from several sites of SE Europe are part of a long-lasting discussion. The sparsely known material, usually toothrows, does not fit well with any known Propotamochoerus species and therefore local peri-Balkan samples have been referred to different species. Based on a fairly complete cra...

Currently, very little is known about the ecology of extinct Eurasian cercopithecids. Dietary information is crucial in understanding the ecological adaptations and diversity of extinct cercopithecids and the evolution of this family. For example, the colobine genus Dolichopithecus is represented by multiple large-bodied species that inhabited Eura...

More than 3000 fossil vertebrate specimens have been unearthed from the new Lower Pleistocene locality of Karnezeika, Peloponnese, Greece. The vast majority of the material (~90%) represents bovids, and their systematic study is provided herein. The bovid assemblage consists of four taxa. A significant portion of the collected bovid material belong...

In the published manuscript, the study presents diverse geochronological and biochronological data providing age constraints on the site of Tsiotra Vryssi (Mygdonia basin, Greece). One of the methods presented is based on burial ages from cosmogenic radionuclides. Table 2 of this study reports cosmogenic simple burial ages of 1.88 ± 0.16 Myr, 2.10...

Numerous fieldwork campaigns, since 1977, in the Lower Pleistocene fossiliferous deposits of Mygdonia Basin (Greece), led to the discovery of several sites, which are located in distinct stratigraphic horizons and correlated to different parts of the late Villafranchian-Epivillafranchian. Their rich and diversified fauna of different evolutionary s...

The Lower Pleistocene Karnazeika locality, lies in the Peloponnese, Southern Greece. and its fauna corresponds to the Middle Villafranchian biochronological unit (MN17), being the most southern Balkan fauna of that age. The recovered mammal assemblage includes, among others, a few remains of a large Cercopithecidae. Herein, the new material, includ...

The sedimentary basins of Greece contain an important record of fossil vertebrates that has been known and studied for nearly two centuries. Here, we present our collective effort to review and summarize this fossil record. A combination of our original research and previously published records permits the complete reassessment of the identified ve...

Extant suids are represented today in the Greek fauna only by the wild boar Sus scrofa, whose local fossil record extends back to the beginning of Middle Pleistocene. Members of the superfamily Suoidea were never abundant in the Neogene-Quaternary of Greece, usually represented by one to two taxa per fossil site. Earliest suoid occurrences are from...

Extant wild bovids of Greece include only the Balkan Chamois and the Wild Goat of Creta, though past bovid biodiversity was tremendously higher, accounting up to ten contemporaneous species and representing a wide array of ecomorphological types. Despite the known stratigraphic discontinuity of the Greek fossil record, the review of the Greek fossi...

Though widely distributed in Europe since the late Eocene and quite abundant since Oligocene to early Miocene, anthracotheres have a very restricted Greek record due mostly to the limited exposure of similar-aged lithostratigraphic formations. Two bothriodontine genera are known so far from coal deposits of three localities in Western (Greek) Thrac...

The pyroclastic rocks of the Lesvos Petrified Forest in the North Aegean comprise one of the early Miocene's most imposing megaflora assemblage. In this area, the new outcrop of Akrocheiras yielded numerous leaf compressions. Based on their macroscopic characteristics, we identified a total of sixteen different taxa, most of them of palaeotropical...

The sedimentary basins of Greece contain an important record of fossil vertebrates that has been known and studied for nearly two centuries. Here, we present our collective effort to review and summarize this fossil record. A combination of our original research and previously published records permits the complete reassessment of the identified ve...

The remains of equids are abundant in the Early Pleistocene faunas of Greece. "Apollonia-1" is one of the richest localities from the latest Villafranchian, providing eight skulls, mandibular remains and plenty of postcranial material during several field campaigns. This study focuses mainly on the skulls, mandibular remains and metapodials from th...

Free download here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7FSR5UB9YGIRPKFQ5AMW/full?target=10.1080/08912963.2021.1878513 Bovidae from the Messinian localities of Italian Peninsula are poorly known and documented except in the Monticino Quarry record (Brisighella, central Italy), which represents, therefore, a key locality for the understanding of Bov...

We describe here five new bovid crania from the Çorakyerler fossil site (Tüglu Formation, Çankırı Basin, north-central Anatolia, Turkey), the fauna of which is dated by magneto- and biostratigraphy to the late Miocene, around the Vallesian–Turolian boundary. The material is assigned to a new bovid taxon of medium-to-large size, Gangraia anatolica g...

The first detailed systematic analysis of the mammal fossils from Dimeh, a new locality in the Zagros basin of Iran, is presented here. The fossil material studied includes cranial remains mostly horn cores of gazelles. Along with these fossils, some new gazelle material recovered from the renowned fossil localities of the middle Maragheh biostrati...

Background and scope: The late Villafranchian large mammal age (~2.0–1.2 Ma) of the Early Pleistocene is a crucial interval of time for mammal/hominin migrations and faunal turnovers in western Eurasia. However, an accurate chronological framework for the Balkans and adjacent territories is still missing, preventing pan-European biogeographic corre...

In this paper, we described the unpublished cervid material from the latest Upper Miocene deposits of the Monticino Quarry (Brisighella, central Italy). The material includes a few teeth, some postcranials and a fragment of antler. An isolated fragment of mandible with dp4 is referred to Cervidae indet. (small-size) due to the absence of diagnostic...

We herein re-discuss the systematics of the Late Miocene representatives of the most common but poorly documented Eurasian giraffid genus Palaeotragus on the occasion of the review and description of new samples from the Vallesian faunas of Northern Greece. Our results detect five Late Miocene Palaeotragus morphotypes, recognizing at least four spe...

Samotherium Major, 1888 (Giraffidae) is recorded from several late Miocene localities, primarily in the Balkans, the northern Black Sea region, Anatolia, central Asia and China. The first complete cranial material, with several mandibular rami, and postcranials of Samotherium are described here from the Middle Maragheh sequence in northwest Iran. T...

The study of the bovid assemblage from the primate-bearing site of Xirochori-1 in Axios Valley, Northern Greece, reveals the presence of four taxa, namely Gazella sp., Ouzocerus cf. pentalophosi, Helladorcas sp. and ‘Protoryx’ sp., and allows updating the faunal list of the Xirochori-1 Vallesian mammal fauna, dated at around 9.6 Ma. Gazella sp. fro...

New bovid material from the Upper Miocene site of Çorakyerler (Çankırı basin, Anatolia, Turkey) is described and compared here. The described taxon is identified as a representative of the stem caprine genus Qurliqnoria, previously known from the peri-Tibetan area exclusively. The stronger horn-core divergence, weaker anterior keel, smoother horn-c...

This paper aims to contribute to the stratigraphic and geochronological evaluation of the primate bearing Dafnero fossil site of Northern Greece by means of lithostratigraphic, paleomagnetic and paleontological analyses. The 60 m thick fossiliferous deposits of fluviatile origin are recognized as representing a typical braided-river sequence unconf...

A new sample of 65 specimens representing a minimum number of 15 individuals of the Eurasian antelope Gazellospira torticornis is described from the Lower Pleistocene fossil sites of Dafnero (DFN, N. Greece). The intrapopulation comparisons highlight that several cranial (frontal sinuses, inter-frontal sutures, longitudinal grooves, degree of the h...

The homotheres, although known from the Greek fossil record since the beginning of the 1930’s, have only been recorded from fragmentary material, sometimes undescribed and with questionable determinations. In 2017, the discovery of an almost complete cranium and a fairly complete humerus of a machairodontine in Dafnero-3, a lower Pleistocene site f...

We here report on fossil remains of the earliest known crown-Testudo, an extant clade of Mediterranean testudinid tortoises from the late Miocene (Vallesian, MN 10) from the hominoid locality Ravin de la Pluie (RPl) in Greece. The material studied is a small, nearly complete carapace with a clearly distinct hypo-xiphiplastral hinge. This supports t...

In the present article, we study the mammoth remains from the late Villafranchian (Early Pleistocene) locality Apollonia-1 (Mygdonia Basin, Northern Greece). The material consists of a hemi-mandible with the m3, isolated m3/M3 and a maxilla fragment with DP2-DP3. The mandibular and dental features permit their attribution to the southern mammoth Ma...

This study presents the new fossil material of bovids from the recently discovered upper Miocene locality of Platania, Drama (Greece). The material was excavated from 2012 to 2016 and yielded approximately 760 specimens attributed to hipparions, rhinos, cervids, giraffids, suids, proboscideans, hyaenids, and turtles. The bovid material described he...

In this work we describe a partial cranium of a suid (Cetartiodactyla, Suidae) from the Messinian post-evaporitic deposits (5.55–5.40 Ma) of Verduno (Piedmont, NW Italy). The splanchnocranium from Verduno preserves almost complete upper tooth rows. The specimen is characterized by a relatively small size, wide snout, weak development of upper canin...

A new and the first mammal fossil locality from the Zagros Basin of Iran is reported here. The fossil locality, known as Dimeh, is located in the Lorestan province, west of Iran. The fauna includes abundant bovid cranial remains, mostly representing boselaphines and palaeoryxoids, as well as gazelles and spiral horned antelopes. Hipparionine horses...

By applying advanced spatial statistical methods, spatial taphonomy complements the traditional taphonomic approach and enhances our understanding of biostratinomic and diagenetic processes. In this study, we elaborate on a specific aspect – spatial anisotropy – of taphonomic processes. We aim to unravel the taphonomic history of the Early Pleistoc...

The continuous enrichment of the European Pleistocene mammal fossil record leads inevitably to a comprehensive forthcoming review of the biogeographic and evolutionary history of bisons on the continent. New and revised data from the post-Olduvai (<1.8 Ma)-pre-Jaramillo (>1.0 Ma) time span of the Mygdonia basin (N. Greece), exposed here, indicate t...

The Greek fossil record of small and large mammal Local Faunal Assemblages is studied and compared by means of cluster analysis techniques using Jaccard similarity index and unweighted pair-group method. The analysis allow recognizing a good arrangement of the Greek LFAs according to time and a main cluster gap, corresponding to an important faunal...

A new comparative study of the two crania, LGPUT RZO-03 and LGPUT RZO-68 attributed to Palaeoreas zouavei Bouvrain, 1980 from the Late Miocene of Axios Valley, Greece reveals great morphological and metric differences between them, which require the exclusion of LGPUT RZO-68 from this species and even from Palaeoreas Gaudry, 1861. This decision lea...

A new fossil cranium of a large papionin monkey from the Lower Pleistocene site of Dafnero-3 in Western Macedonia, Greece, is described by means of outer and inner morphological and metric traits using high-resolution micro-computed tomography. Comparisons with modern cercopithecids and contemporaneous Eurasian fossil taxa suggest that the new cran...

A new fossil cranium of a large papionin monkey from the Lower Pleistocene site of Dafnero-3 in Western Macedonia, Greece, is described by means of outer and inner morphological and metric traits using high-resolution micro-computed tomography. Comparisons with modern cercopithecids and contemporaneous Eurasian fossil taxa suggest that the new cran...

The early Pleistocene is represented by a succession of glacial–interglacial cycles characterized by a general tendency towards global cooling, with increasing aridity and seasonality. The large deer Eucladoceros is found in abundance in Europe during this period of faunal dispersions. The dietary plasticity of Eucladoceros and how it can mirror ea...

Analysis of the external morphological features and the inner structures i.e. the maxillary sinuses of a recently discovered cercopithecine cranium from the lower Pleistocene locality of Dafnero 3 (DFN3), NorthWest Greece, ascribed to either Procynocephalus or Paradolichopithecus.

We report on the earliest modern Testudo from the late Miocene (Vallesian, MN 10) of the hominoid locality, Ravin de la Pluie (RPl), Greece. The material corresponds to a small nearly complete carapace owning a well distinct hypo-xiphiplastral hinge, which supports the sensu stricto generic assignment. This new terrestrial testudinid specimen is ch...

A new Late Miocene bovid, Urmiatherium kassandriensis sp. nov., from Northern Greece is described. The material comes from the Fourka locality in the Kassandra Peninsula (Chalkidiki), and the included fauna is estimated to be of Vallesian age. The two preserved crania represent a medium-sized taxon with short, conical horn cores, a flat cranial roo...

Having arrived 1.8 Ma ago, bison prevailed in the bovid assemblages of the European subcontinent for more than 1.5 Ma. The current geometric morphometric study outlines a framework of ecomorphological differences among several Bison populations of the western Palaearctic, shown by inferences from the tibial and tarsal joint surfaces of their astrag...