The fossil record of igneous rock

Disentangling rock record bias and common-cause from redundancy in the British fossil record

The fossil record documents the history of life, but the reliability of that record has often been questioned. Spatiotemporal variability in sedimentary rock volume, sampling and research effort especially frustrates global-scale diversity reconstructions. Various proposals have been made to rectify palaeodiversity estimates using proxy measures for the availability and sampling of the rock rec...

Fossil embryos deep in the fossil record

Embryos have been found in ‘old’ rocks on four continents, especially in Siberia, Nevada, Australia and China. They have been discovered in sedimentary rocks of even Late Neoproterozoic age, assuming the evolutionary geological column1 (figure 1). The Neoproterozoic is the period, so called, between 1 billion and 550 million years ago. This discovery was in the Doushantuo Formation, Guizhou Pro...

The Primate Fossil Record

The Fossil Record of Cyanobacteria

2.4 Cyanobacterial Fossils.................................................. 22 2.4.1 Filamentous Cyanobacteria ............................................ 22 2.4.1.1 Oscillatoriaceae .............................................................. 22 2.4.1.2 Nostocaceae .................................................................... 24 2.4.2 Coccoid and Ellipsoid Cyanobacteria ...............

Water from the rock: Ancient aquatic angiosperms flow from the fossil record.

The world of 120 million years ago was one of dynamic biological processes. During that time the flowering plants emerged as the dominant global floristic element, a transformative event that ultimately altered the character of the entire planet. Understandably, the rapid rise of angiosperms has intrigued paleoecologists and evolutionary biologists, who have strived to elucidate underlying expl...