Late Miocene Fishes from the Eurasian/Afro-Arabian Contact Zone in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey

Two fossil fish were recently recovered from late Miocene freshwater deposits of the Muş Basin in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. This area is in the collision zone of the Afro-Arabian and Eurasian plates, and therefore is a biogeographic contact zone or ecotone, where different biotas have been brought together. Only one fish was previously known from the area, the leuciscine cyprinid Leuciscus (Palaeoleuciscus) oeningensis. Renewed collecting at this locality provides the potential to determine much more information about the composition of the biogeographic contact zone. The two fishes described here are not named; one is placed in the family Clupeidae and the other is left as an indeterminate teleost. The fishes from the Muş Basin locality indicate that the fauna, or at least the fish portion, of the ecotone has an overall Eurasian origin, with little or no Afro-Arabian component.