“…The period between the Eocene beginning of underwater orogeny and the Pliocene joining of North and South America with an uninterrupted emergent Isthmus was a time of monumental changes on land and sea (reviews in Coates & Obando, ; Jaramillo, ; O'Dea et al, ). Deep water became shallow (Collins, Budd, & Coates, ; Collins, Coates, Berggren, Aubry, & Zhang, ; Collins, Coates, & Obando, ), currents were deflected (Haug & Tiedemann, ; Kameo & Sato, ), water passages between the eastern Pacific and the western Atlantic became narrow (Duque‐Caro, ) and were eventually blocked (Coates, Obando, & Gonzalez, ). The isthmus, as a strip of uninterrupted land separating the Caribbean from the eastern Pacific, was completed approximately three million years ago (Ma) (Jaramillo, ; O'Dea et al, ), although there is still a question as to whether intermittent closures occurred before this date (Jaramillo, ).…”