Naming and First Evidence
The Messinian salt deposits that are outcropping (because they were uplifted by tectonic activity during later episodes) in places like Messina in Sicily, northeast Libya, Italy, and southern Spain have been described since the 19th century and it is then that the salinity crisis theory started to be developed.
Karl Mayer-Eymar (1826–1907) a Swiss geologist and palaeontologist, studied fossils between gypsum-bearing, brackish and freshwater sediment layers and identified them as having been deposited just before the end of the Miocene Epoch. In 1867 he named the period the Messinian, for the region of Messina. Since then salt-bearing and gypsum-bearing evaporite layers in many Mediterranean countries have been dated to that period.
Read more about this topic: Messinian Salinity Crisis
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