An isolated, articulated, but crushed ossified lung of a mawsoniid coelacanth is reported from uppermost Cretaceous (upper Maastrichtian) Oued Zem, Morocco. The specimen the last record before their pseudo-extinction at end Mesozoic. also first marine in Mesozoic Morocco and occurrence coelacanths phospahte deposits North Africa. large size suggests fish estimated between 3.65 m 5.52 total body...

Large-scale adaptive radiations might explain the runaway success of a minority of extant vertebrate clades. This hypothesis predicts, among other things, rapid rates of morphological evolution during the early history of major groups, as lineages invade disparate ecological niches. However, few studies of adaptive radiation have included deep time data, so the links between extant diversity an...

The geometry of feather barbs (barb length and barb angle) determines feather vane asymmetry and vane rigidity, which are both critical to a feather's aerodynamic performance. Here, we describe the relationship between barb geometry and aerodynamic function across the evolutionary history of asymmetrical flight feathers, from Mesozoic taxa outside of modern avian diversity (Microraptor, Archaeo...

BACKGROUND Temnospondyls are one of the earliest radiations of limbed vertebrates. Skeletal remains of more than 190 genera have been identified from late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic rocks. Paleozoic temnospondyls comprise mainly small to medium sized forms of diverse habits ranging from fully aquatic to fully terrestrial. Accordingly, their ichnological record includes tracks described from m...

A catalog of 383 earthquakes in southeastern New York, southwestern Connecticut, northern New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania, including metropolitan New York City and Philadelphia, is compiled from historical and instrumental data from 1677 through 2006. A magnitude-felt area relationship is used to calculate the equivalent magnitudembLg prior to the advent of abundant instrumental data in 19...

[1] Abstract: Peridotite xenoliths erupted in late Miocene basalts ( 8 Ma) in the central Sierra Nevada sample a lithosphere that is vertically stratified in terms of age and thermal history. The deeper portions ( 45–100 km) have asthenospheric osmium isotopic compositons and possess textural and chemical evidence for cooling from >11008 to 700–8208C. The shallower portions (<60 km) have unradi...

—A new species of aphroditiform polychaete, Protopholoe colombiana, is described from the Coniacian of Colombia, South America, increasing the number of species of this genus known from the fossil record to two. This is the first occurrence of fossil soft-bodied polychaetes in the Tropical Americas, and indicates that aphroditiforms were spread worldwide during the Mesozoic.

In the past only very few works dealt with fossil decapod crustaceans from Slovakia. The systematic research of this group has never been fully conducted there. This contribution provides a short review of all known Mesozoic and Cenozoic fossil decapod occurrences. So far, most of the taxa were described from the Eocene and Miocene strata.

Schmitz and Motani (Reports, 6 May 2011, p. 705) claimed to definitively reconstruct activity patterns of Mesozoic archosaurs using the anatomy of the orbit and scleral ring. However, we find serious flaws in the data, methods, and interpretations of this study. Accordingly, it is not yet possible to reconstruct the activity patterns of most fossil archosaurs with a high degree of confidence.

Daphnia O.F. Müller (Crustacea: Cladocera: Daphniidae) is an important model in biology. It was concluded earlier that subgenus Daphnia s.str. occurs mainly in the northern hemisphere, subgenus Daphnia (Ctenodaphnia) in the southern hemisphere, which could suggest that: (1) the subgeneric differentiation is correlated with the Laurasia-Gondwanaland subdivision and (2) D. (Ctenodaphnia) is a tax...