Late Cretaceous marine incursion into Central African continent

Abstract The Late Cretaceous global transgression is one of the best well-documented episodes of continental submergence events. Conventional perspective holds that the transgression scope of the New Tethys Ocean into the African continent is limited to the North African continent. Here, we found some transgression traces in the Muglad Basin of the Central African continent. A series of special molecular markers were detected in the Upper Cretaceous Santonian-Maastrichtian sediments of the Muglad Basin, which are completely different from those in the typical lacustrine sediments of the Lower Cretaceous Barremian-Aptian. Combining the geological-geochemical implications of these markers with the paleogeographic, paleontological and lithological records, we propose that the Muglad Basin received intermittent marine inundations during the Santonian-Maastrichian stages (86.3‒66.0 Ma) and these special molecular markers are therefore the products of seawater incursion. Consequently, this study firstly proposes that the transgression scope of the Neo-Tethys Ocean into the African continent southern extended to the Central Africa continent during the Late Cretaceous.