This work was supported by the Swiss National Fund, project 2100-068061.02 (A.B), the program CNRS/INSU-Eclipse, project 00-10 (A.B and G.E), and a Region Rhône-Alpes-Eurodoc grant (A.B). We thank B. Vrielynck (Université Paris VI) for calculating Neogene locality palaeocoordinates and P. Allemand (Université Claude Bernard Lyon1) for his help on spatial interpolation. T. Galfetti and C. Klug (PIM Zürich) are thanked for the Italian and German abstracts. This manuscript benefited from the generous effort and the corrections of A. Mason and P.D. Polly. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.