A STEGODON FROM THE AREA OF SIATISTA, KOZANI, MACEDONIA, GREECE; THE FIRST EVIDENCE OF THE PRESENCE OF STEGODONS IN EUROPE.

Dick Mol, Research associate, Natural History Museum, Rotterdam and Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire, France, c/o Gudumholm 41, NL-2133 HG Hoofddorp, the Netherlands. E-mail: dickmol@telfort.nl

Evangelia Tsoukala, Aristotle University, School of Geology, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: lilits@geo.auth.gr

Anna Batsi, Giouleka 1, 50300 Siatista, Kozani, Greece. E-mail: annampatsi@yahoo.co.uk


The Siatista’s Palaeontological Collection, housed in a high-school building in Siatista, Kozani, Macedonia, Greece, was studied by the authors in the summer of 2009. The collection was brought together by local people from 1902 onwards, under the initiative of Mr. Nikolaos Diamantopoulos. Mr. Anastasios Danas, a high-school teacher at the Trampantzeion Gymnasium in Siatista, was the main collector and he founded the Siatista’s Palaeontological Collection in 1906. The records of the collection are minimal and it is not always clear from which locality the fossils were collected. However, the archived documents indicate that all the fossils were collected in the larger region of Siatista. One of the villages where fossils originated is Polylakkos. In 1976, Professor Ioannes K. Melentis, famous for all his studies and publications on the fossil proboscideans of Greece, realized the importance of the collection and in 1980 he became involved in the study and management of the collection which was donated to the community of Siatista in 1994.

This interesting collection contains 56 remains of Pliocene and Pleistocene proboscideans, including the mastodon of Auvergne, Anancus arvernensis, the southern mammoth, Mammuthus meridionalis and the straight-tusked elephant, Elephas antiquus. All the material has been re-identified and catalogued by the authors. One of the most interesting items in the collection is a fragment of a lower m3 of a stegodon, Stegodon sp., catalogued as SIA 22.

The fragment of the molar (figure 1) represents two unworn molar ridges from approximately the middle of a right lower molar and counting 8 conelets in the anterior, and 7 in the posterior ridge. The maximum width of the specimen is 83 mm, measured at the base of the anterior ridge, and the maximum height measures 53 mm. The width at the base of the ridges is 31 mm, and 30 mm, both measurements taken at the lingual side. The valleys between the two ridges is not filled with cementum, which also often covers the lingual and buccal edges. We unpacked the broken specimen from an old box in 2009 and measure the thickness of enamel to be 7 mm.

Unfortunately, there are no data on the locality, date or by whom the specimen has been collected; neither is there any information on its geological age. Since the state of preservation, the weight of the specimen and its coloration are the same as all the other proboscidean fossils in the Siatista Collection, we do not doubt that this specimen is from the larger region of Siatista. According to the historical documents, we would like to emphasize that there are only fossils from the Siatista area in this collection.

The molar fragment has been compared by the authors with the abundant material of southeast Asian stegodon material in the Dubois Collection at the National Natural History Museum, Naturalis, in Leiden, the Netherlands.

The identification up to the stegodon species level has not yet been made. Hooijer, 1960, has described a fragment of a molar of a stegodon from the Middle Pleistocene of Israel as a new species of stegodon, Stegodon mediterraneus. A comparative study of the Greek specimen with that of Israel is necessary.

In 2010, the Siatista’s Palaeontological Collection will be placed on display in the wonderfully restored Trampantzeion Gymnasium building on the Ioannis Trampatzis Square in Siatista. With the new paleontological exhibition we hope to stimulate interest in palaeontology, especially by the local people of Siatista and surrounding areas. Many new discoveries have shed light on the diversity of fossils in the area and the locality where the SIA 22 specimen was collected, probably about a century ago.

In this presentation we will present the first evidence of the presence of a stegodon in Europe which increases the distribution area of stegodons outside Southeast Asia, Africa and Israel.

Literature

Hooijer, D.A., 1960. A Stegodon from Israel. The Bulletin of the Research Council of Israel, section G. Geo-Sciences, Vol. 9G, 2-3: 104-108.