8.1 Two Research Conundrums..................................................................................................134 8.1.1 Lindblom’s Theory of Administrative Incrementalism...........................................134 8.1.2 Wildavsky’s Theory of Budgetary Incrementalism.................................................135 8.1.3 The Diverse Meanings of Budgetary “Incrementalism”.......

The major osteological features are described for living billfishes. All billfish remains are reviewed critically and some questionable forms are placed in Xiphioidei Incertae Sedis (uncertain status). The remaining xiphioids are placed into three families: Istiophoridae, Xiphiidae, and Xiphiorhynchidae. A new undescribed xiphiid from Mississippi shows that the billfish lineages must have diver...

A spectacular Cambrian soft bodied fauna some 40 km from Walcott's original Burgess Shale locality includes over 50 taxa, some 20% new to science. New anatomical evidence from this site will illuminate the evolution of early marine animals.

Our group has been developing new algorithms for the analyses of complete genome sequences, and using these algorithms to make a variety of biological discoveries in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. The computational backbone of many of our analyses is a system that that can align DNA sequences of essentially any size, including entire human chromosomes, in just a few minutes on a lar...

ll science involves what we might call "art" in the sense of requiring intuition, creativity, and inspiration (whether to grasp the underlying causal connection between seemingly unrelated observations or to construct an elegant experimental design). But in a few disciplines, science also closely intermingles with the fine arts, such as painting and sculpture. Dinosaur study is one such discipl...

A comprehensive, but simple-to-use software package for executing a range of standard numerical analysis and operations used in quantitative paleontology has been developed. The program, called PAST (PAleontological STatistics), runs on standard Windows computers and is available free of charge. PAST integrates spreadsheet-type data entry with univariate and multivariate statistics, curve fitti...

Sedimentation in the Lowermost Cambrian of China A. Braun, J.-Y. Chen, D. Waloszek & A. Maas Institute of Palaeontology, University of Bonn, Nussallee 8, D-53115 Bonn, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, China University of Ulm, Section for Biosystematic Documentation, Helmholtzstrasse 20, D-98081 Ulm, Ge...

What was your favorite conference? ‘Evolution — The Molecular Landscape’, a Cold Spring Harbor Symposium celebrating the Darwin bicentenary. It lasted six days, and the talks often went to 11p.m.; it was exhausting, presentations were all firstrate, but best were the interactions before, between and after the sessions. And, it was an energizing mix of disciplines from paleontology to the origin...

The genomics revolution offers great promise for resolving the phylogeny of living taxa, but does it offer any benefits for reconstructing relationships among extinct (fossil) taxa? Superficially, the answer would seem to be "no," given that molecular data cannot be obtained for most fossil taxa. However, because fossil taxa often interdigitate among living taxa on the Tree of Life, molecular d...

This issue of Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology is devoted to papers on the Permian– Triassic boundary crisis and Early Triassic biotic recovery. It is an outgrowth of the Symposium on Early Triassic Chronostratigraphy and Biotic Recovery that was held in Chaohu, China, on May 21st–23rd, 2005 under the auspices of IGCP Project 467 and attended by about 200 Earth scientists with a ...