The tetrapod ichnotaxon Apatopus lineatus is a relatively uncommon component of Late Triassic footprint assemblages. This might be related to the semi-aquatic lifestyle of the trackmakers, which were almost certainly phytosaurs and whose skeletons are known from coeval deposits with a Pangea-wide distribution. Originally described from the Passaic Formation of New Jersey, Apatopus lineatus has ...

BACKGROUND Sauropterygia is an abundant and successful group of Triassic marine reptiles. Phylogenetic relationships of Triassic Sauropterygia have always been unstable and recently questioned. Although specimens occur in high numbers, the main problems are rareness of diagnostic material from the Germanic Basin and uniformity of postcranial morphology of eosauropterygians. In the current paper...

The oldest archosauromorphs (dinosaurs, birds, crocodiles, and their stem-taxa) are recorded in middle?upper Permian rocks, but it was not after the Permo?Triassic mass extinction that group shows a substantially high taxonomic richness ecomorphological disparity. early evolutionary history of Archosauromorpha during Early Middle Triassic is mainly based on fossils recovered from rocks southern...

Extinctions within major pelagic groups (e.g., radiolarians and conodonts) occurred in a stepwise fashion during the last 15 Myr of the Triassic. Although a marked decline in the diversity of pelagic faunas began at the end of the middle Norian, the cause of the middle Norian extinction is uncertain. Here we show a possible link between the end-middle Norian radiolarian extinction and a bolide ...

Introduction: The age of the ~23 km in diameter Rochechouart impact structure, France, hosted by Precambrian to Paleozoic (Variscan) crystalline rocks of the northwestern French Massif Central, has long time been a matter of debate. Previous studies, including K-Ar, Rb-Sr, apatite and glass fission track, as well as paleomagnetic dating (see [1] for summary of ages), resulted in a broad (Middle...

Actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes) successfully passed through four of the big five mass extinction events of the Phanerozoic, but the effects of these crises on the group are poorly understood. Many researchers have assumed that the Permo-Triassic mass extinction (PTME) and end-Triassic extinction (ETE) had little impact on actinopterygians, despite devastating many other groups. Here, two m...

The upper Triassic deposits of the Selous Basin in south Tanzania have not been prospected for fossil tetrapods since the middle of last century, when Gordon M. Stockley collected two rhynchosaur bone fragments from the so called "Tunduru beds". Here we present the results of a field trip conducted in July 2015 to the vicinities of Tunduru and Msamara, Ruvuma Region, Tanzania, in search for sim...

Triassic successions of the present-day Arctic contain abundant and diverse assemblages nonmarine palynomorphs that have provided important biostratigraphic information. Dinoflagellate cyst are biostratigraphically useful in marine intervals Upper Triassic. Based on published records, we present a compilation 78 last occurrences (LOs), first (FOs), some abundance events anticipated to correlati...

Compared with other Mesozoic tetrapod groups, chigutisaurid fossils from Australia are rare, only three named taxa described the continent. From Queensland, Keratobrachyops australis is known Triassic, and Siderops kehli Jurassic. Koolasuchus cleelandi, Cretaceous of Victoria, represents youngest-known temnospondyl globally. Here we describe first New South Wales, Early–Middle Triassic Terrigal...

A major macroevolutionary question concerns how long-term patterns of body-size evolution are underpinned by smaller scale processes along lineages. One outstanding long-term transition is the replacement of basal therapsids (stem-group mammals) by archosauromorphs, including dinosaurs, as the dominant large-bodied terrestrial fauna during the Triassic (approx. 252-201 million years ago). This ...