The Middle Palaeozoic of the Western Meseta – introduction to the third research compilation

The Moroccan Meseta is the complex southern extension of the European Variscides. It has been investigated in the last ca. 100 years by numerous researchers from Morocco and abroad but the relationships with the crustal blocks of Southern Europe are still reconstructed in very controversial ways. Many details of Moroccan research history and outstanding outcrops can be found in the summaries of geology by El Hassani (2022, 2023). The here presented volume is the third in a series in this journal (see Becker et al., Eds., 2020, 2021) that combines detailed reviews of published work with a wealth of new data on mid-Palaeozoic stratigraphy, faunas, facies developments, and synsedimentary structural geology. The overall research goal focuses on representative Western Meseta and Submeseta regions positioned to the west or south of the Middle Atlas (Fig. 1). The aim of a joint DFG/CNRST Maroc project, which was continued in all the subsequent years, was to retrieve refined data for a new reconstruction of the Western Mesta top-Silurian to basal Carboniferous (Tournaisian) palaeogeography, biogeogeography, synsedimentary tectonism and to document the regional expression of global events, all with the highest available time precision.