On the Late Miocene continentalization of the Guadix Basin: More evidence for a major Messinian hiatus

The chronology of the Late Miocene Mediterranean-Atlantic gateways through southern Iberia is a key issue to better understand the geodynamic processes that lead to the Messinian salinity crisis. The timing of the North Betic corridor continentalization has recently been constrained by integrated magnetobiostratigraphic dating of the La Lancha section in the Guadix basin (Hüsing et al., 2010: Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 291, 167–179). This work showed that the continentalization of the Guadix basin encompasses an approximately 2 myr hiatus, with the interval between ∼7.7 to ∼5.5 (or 5.0) Ma missing in the stratigraphic record. Minwer-Barakat and colleagues comment that this hiatus could be slightly shorter, but they base their hypotheses solely on an interval without any reliable magnetostratigraphic data. Their key localities Negratín 1 and Rambla de Chimeneas 3 (MN13), however, confirm that the oldest faunas found at La Lancha section correlate with the upper part of chron C3r (∼5.5 Ma). These continental faunas thus provide more evidence on the presence of a major Messinian hiatus in the Guadix record.