title: Synchronous turnover of flora, fauna, and climate at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary in Asia.
abstract: The Eocene-Oligocene Boundary (~34 million years ago) marks one of the largest extinctions of marine invertebrates in the world oceans and of mammalian fauna in Europe and Asia in the Cenozoic era. A shift to a cooler climate across this boundary has been suggested as the cause of this extinction in the marine environment, but there is no manifold evidence for a synchronous turnover of flora, fauna and climate at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary in a single terrestrial site in Asia to support this hypothesis. Here we report new data of magnetostratigraphy, pollen and climatic proxies in the Asian interior across the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary; our results show that climate change forced a turnover of flora and fauna, suggesting there was a change from large-size perissodactyl-dominant fauna in forests under a warm-temperate climate to small rodent/lagomorph-dominant fauna in forest-steppe in a dry-temperate climate across the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary. These data provide a new terrestrial record for this significant Cenozoic environmental event.
authors.affiliation: 1] Key Laboratory of Cenozoic Geology and Environment, Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China [2] CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences.
authors.forename: Jimin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xijun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ni
authors.affiliation: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Shundong
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bi
authors.affiliation: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Wenyu
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.affiliation: 1] Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China [2] American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York 10024, USA.
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Meng
authors.affiliation: Department of Geology, University of Leicester, Leicester LEI 7RH, UK.
authors.forename: Brian F
authors.initials: BF
authors.lastname: Windley
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001208:Asia; D005075:Biological Evolution; D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D005580:Fossils; D019015:Geologic Sediments; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D010802:Phylogeny; D012621:Seasons