Extinct animals from Turkey, new species discoveries

This video from the USA says about itself:

Cancellaria conradiana gastropod fossil part two October 24 2019

Research shows it to be a Pliocene snail shell 5.333 Million years old to 2.58 million years old. The earth was cooling down the ice sheets were moving South and fauna migrated away from the ice sheets.

During my 16 December 2019 visit to Naturalis museum, I found about new fossil discoveries/

At the Live Science Lab, I met researcher Eelco Kruidenier. With the help of a microscope and a computer, he studied gravel from a valley in a mountain area east of Izmir in Turkey.

That gravel was about 2-3 million years old: from the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene eras. Back then, these valleys were freshwater lakes. The gravel contains lots of fossils of animals which lived then in or around these lakes. Eg, many shells of freshwater snails. Many of these shells are smaller than one millimetre, even adult snails. So, one really needs the microscope to discover them among the gravel. Every now and then, Mr Kruidenier discovered another shell and put it aside.

There are also fossils from many other animal species: bones of small mammals like mice, reptiles and amphibians. It looks like the overwhelming majority of the animals are both extinct species and new to science.

Naturalis does its research on this Turkish gravel jointly with other museums and universities, eg, in Turkey, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. If, eg, in Naturalis, reptile fossils are found in the gravel, then the University of Florence in Italy is contacted, as they specialize in reptiles from that era.

Mr Kuidenier had previously done research on small mammals of the Gargano peninsula in Italy. During the Miocene and Pliocene, Gargano was an island; which led to evolution of endemic species, like a giant hedgehog and giant birds of prey.