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The late Miocene is marked by pronounced environmentalchanges and the appearance of strong temperature andprecipitation seasonality. Although environmental heterogeneityis to be expected during this time, it is challenging to reconstructpalaeoenvironments using plant fossils. We investigated leavesand dispersed spores/pollen from 6.4 to 6 Ma strata inthe intermontane Florina–Ptolemais–Servia Basin (FPS) ofnorthwestern Greece. To assess how well plant fossils reflectthe actual vegetation of the FPS, we assigned fossil taxa tobiomes providing a measure for environmental heterogeneity.Additionally, the palynological assemblage was compared withpollen spectra from modern lake sediments to assess biases inspore/pollen representation in the pollen record. We found aclose match of the Vegora assemblage with modern Fagus–Abiesforests of Turkey. Using taxonomic affinities of leaf fossils, wefurther established close similarities of the Vegora assemblage with modern laurophyllous oak forests of Afghanistan. Finally, using information from sedimentaryenvironment and taphonomy, we distinguished local and distantly growing vegetation types.We thensubjected the plant assemblage of Vegora to different methods of climate reconstruction and discussedtheir potentials and limitations. Leaf and spore/pollen records allow accurate reconstructions ofpalaeoenvironments in the FPS, whereas extra-regional vegetation from coastal lowlands isprobably not captured.

A new podocnemidoidean turtle, Nostimochelonelampra gen. et sp. nov., was recently recovered fromlittoral marine-estuarine sediments of the lower MioceneZeugostasion Formation, near the village of Nostimo innorthwestern Macedonia, Greece. This new taxon is characterizedby a mosaic of primitive and derived features mostnotably the presence of a broad embayment on the anteriorcarapace margin, which involves both the nuchal (whosewidth[length) and first pair of peripherals, a continuousseries of six markedly elongate and very narrowed hexagonalneural bones, extension of the axillary buttress onto themidline of the anteroposteriorly elongate costal I (leavinga concave scar) and also laterally across the peripheralII-peripheral III suture, medial contact of the humeral scutes(implying a small intergular), and extensive overlap of thepectoral scutes on the entoplastron, probably extending tothe epiplastral-hyoplastral suture. Conclusive phylogeneticplacement of Nostimochelone is difficult to establishbecause the remains are incompletely preserved. Nevertheless,its discovery is significant because it represents boththe first record of a pleurodiran turtle from Greece and alsoone of only a handful of fossil podocnemidoidean occurrencesthus far documented from the Neogene of Europe.