AND HERE WE GO, result of yesterdays formation #paleostream. The early Miocene of the Austrian Paratethys, home of my many cool critters, but not Cetotherium, although we first expected it to be present here we discovered that during this time a small whales can't be confidently placed here. Despite that we stuck with this place and time of the Paratethys because it still offers a LOT of cool fauna, marine and terrestrial.

We choose three formations from Northern East Austria. The environment seems to be rather stable during this time.

here my quick and dirty size chart to figure out how the larger animals would relate in size to each other.

And now an earlier sketch of the composition, when we still thought we could have a Cetotherium in here. We afterwards also tried this with a local basking skark but that doesn't really fit this feeding style. Instead I settled eventually on Austromola being cleaned by seabirds.

One of my favorite parts in here was the giant oyster reef. Crassostrea gryphoides could grow up to 60 cm long and the town of Stetten has one of these preserved over several hundred square meter.

An attempted at a size comparison of Romaleodelphis, the recently described "dolphin" from the Miocene of Austria. I couldn't find any good material of the closely related Chilcacetus, so instead based the proportions more on eurhinodelphinids, so take the size with a grain of salt.

Romaleodelphis is a recently described species from the Early Miocene Konservatlagerstätte at Pucking, Upper Austria, which preserves fauna dating to the early Miocene when much of eastern Austria was underwater. A somewhat generalized depiction of this time was actually drawn very recently by @knuppitalism-with-ue (I still got a half-written reblog of his piece sitting in my drafts). Of these animals, the giant sunfish Austromola and the loon Petralca are both from the same locality as Romaleodelphis, which sadly didn't make it in on account of having been named just a week too late.

Beloptera longa

The Caspian Sea is Earth's largest lake at 386,000 km² (149,000 mi²). Lake Paratethys, which existed twelve million years ago between the Alps and Kazakhstan, was 2.8 million km² (1.08 million mi²). More than seven times larger.

Planopusa semenovi paleoart

Monachopsis pontica paleoart