PALEONTOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

Avian Paleontology and Evolution

Miocoracias chenevali, nov. gen., nov. spec., a new genus and species of roller (Aves: Coraciiformes s. s.: Coraciidae) is described from the Early Miocene of Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. This family had not yet been reported from the rich fossil avifauna of this area. Although the material is fragmentary it shows morphological characteristics different from those of the extinct family Geranopteridae, ...

Evolution in fossil lineages: paleontology and The Origin of Species.

Of all of the sources of evidence for evolution by natural selection, perhaps the most problematic for Darwin was the geological record of organic change. In response to the absence of species-level transformations in the fossil record, Darwin argued that the fossil record was too incomplete, too biased, and too poorly known to provide strong evidence against his theory. Here, this view of the ...

Functional craniology and brain evolution: from paleontology to biomedicine

Anatomical systems are organized through a network of structural and functional relationships among their elements. This network of relationships is the result of evolution, it represents the actual target of selection, and it generates the set of rules orienting and constraining the morphogenetic processes. Understanding the relationship among cranial and cerebral components is necessary to in...

Functional Paleontology: The Evolution of User-Visible System Services

It has long been accepted that requirements analysis should precede architectural design and implementation, but in software evolution and reverse engineering this concern with black-box analysis of function has necessarily been de-emphasized in favor of code-based analysis and designer-oriented interpretation. In this paper, we redress this balance by describing “functional paleontology,” an a...

Genetics, Paleontology, and Macroevolution