2025-2029
Project
EDEN's
Life during past super-warm climate
events: Evolutionary Dynamics of
Early EoceNe mammals from
Southwestern France
Supervisors
Rodolphe TABUCE (ISEM, University of Montpellier)
Funding
EDEN is a multidisciplinary research project (2021–2025) funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
Aims
The EDEN project aims to improve our understanding of the impacts of global warming events (Eocene Thermal Maximums, ETMs)—short but intense warming episodes that occurred during the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (~53–49 Ma)—on terrestrial vertebrate and plant communities from several sedimentary basins in the Occitanie region of southern France.
Objectives and Preliminary Results
In a palaeontological and stratigraphic context that is unique in Europe, the EDEN project aims to investigate long, relatively continuous fossil-bearing stratigraphic sections in the Occitanie region, where our team has recently acquired significant new data from the Corbières, Lauragais, Minervois, and Montpellier areas.
These investigations have led to the discovery of exceptionally rich mammalian faunas associated with a wide range of terrestrial vertebrates—including actinopterygians, turtles, crocodilians, and squamates—as well as diverse plant assemblages documenting most of the Early Eocene.
Consortium
EDEN is co-led by G. Garcia (PALEVOPRIM), together with Flavia Girard (Geosciences Montpellier), who leads Work Package 2, Dynamic Palaeoenvironmental Reconstruction; F. Lihoreau (ISEM), who leads Work Package 1, A Temporal Framework for Mammalian Macroevolution; and Rodolphe Tabuce (ISEM), the project’s principal investigator.
EDEN is a collaborative partnership between the Palaeontology, Evolution, Palaeoecosystems, and Palaeoprimatology Laboratory (PALEVOPRIM; CNRS/University of Poitiers), the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences of Montpellier (ISEM; CNRS/University of Montpellier/EPHE/IRD), and Geosciences Montpellier (CNRS/University of Montpellier/University of the French West Indies).
The project also involves several external collaborators and amateur palaeontologists. In addition, EDEN builds on two UNESCO Global Geopark initiatives.
It involves numerous fieldwork campaigns, some of which are led and organized by Xavier Valentin (PALEVOPRIM) at sites discovered by our team.
