On Mallorca, a crab from 35 million years ago is found, previously unknown to the Iberian Peninsula
The discovery, made in Randa, in the municipality of Algaida, is the first record of a crustacean of this antiquity in the Balearic Islands and provides new clues about the fauna that inhabited the ancient tropical sea that covered the Archipelago
PalmaMallorca continues to reveal the secrets of its most remote past. A team of researchers linked to the Balearic Museum of Natural Sciences has identified in Randa, Algaida, the fossil remains of a marine crab that lived about 35 million years ago and had never been documented until now on the Iberian Peninsula.
The find, published in the Bulletin of the Society of Natural History of the Balearic Islands, also constitutes the first record of a crustacean of this antiquity located in the Balearic Islands and represents a new step in understanding what the Balearic territory was like millions of years before the formation of the current islands.
The study has been carried out by researchers Àlex Ossó, Josep Juárez-Ruiz, and Rafel Matamales-Andreu, the latter two linked to the Balearic Museum of Natural Sciences. The remains correspond to the Palaeocarpilius cf. macrochelus, an extinct species that inhabited warm, shallow waters during the Eocene. "Every new find helps us better understand what the Balearic Islands were like before the current islands existed and what organisms lived there. There is still much to discover, and the sites in Mallorca continue to offer results of great scientific interest," point out the researchers.
When Mallorca was submerged
Approximately 35 million years ago, the landscape of Mallorca was radically different from today's. The Archipelago did not yet exist as we know it and a large part of the territory was submerged under a tropical sea linked to the ancient Tethys Sea, a predecessor of the modern Mediterranean. In that ecosystem, corals, mollusks, sea urchins, and numerous species of crustaceans thrived. The crab now identified was an animal with a robust body, a wide and rounded shell, and large pincers—one more developed than the other—which it probably used to capture and break up prey.
Although specimens related to this group of crabs had been found previously in Catalonia, Aragon, and the southeast of the Peninsula, this is the first time the genus Palaeocarpilius has been documented in Mallorca and the Balearic Islands. The discovery reinforces the hypothesis that, during the Eocene, the marine fauna inhabiting this territory was very similar to that of the coasts of present-day northern Italy. This connection allows scientists to more accurately reconstruct the relationships between the ancient Tethys Sea ecosystems and better understand the geological evolution of the Mediterranean.
The research also highlights the scientific collections of the Balearic Museum of Natural Sciences. The main specimen analyzed arrived at the center thanks to the donation of Joan Capellà Galmés, an example of how citizen collaboration can contribute to preserving and expanding knowledge about the natural heritage of the Balearic Islands.
Researchers emphasize that Mallorca's geological outcrops still hide numerous vestiges of the past and that new discoveries could provide key information about the ecosystems that existed millions of years before the formation of the current Archipelago.