The Early Pleistocene site of Pietrafitta (central Italy) produced a rich vertebrate assemblage from the Late Villafranchian Land Mammal Age (late MN18). Geological and paleobotanical data indicate lacustrine environment, surrounded by humid deciduous broadleaved forest with temperate climate. consists at least 40 taxa including actinopterygians, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. Here, we c...

The anomaly P is a widespread morphological anomaly, which occurs in some groups of amphibians, caused by the trematode parasite Strigea robusta (Digenea: Strigeidae). This has been previously recorded water frogs genus Pelophylax and toads genera Bufo Bufotes . includes symmetrical polydactyly cases as mild attenuated form complex syndrome, severe strong deformations hindlimbs forelimbs. 3-hos...

The blue crab Callinectes sapidus has seen a general decline in population levels. One factor influencing mortality is infections by Hematodinium perezi, a dinoflagellate parasite. A 2 yr study was conducted in 2014 and 2015 to monitor H. perezi DNA within the Maryland (USA) coastal bays, comparing seasonal cycles in the abundance of parasite DNA in environmental samples to parasite presence in...

In a recent paper, Dolado, Gonzalo and Mayoral (2002) introduce a fractional Dickey-Fuller (FD-F) t-statistic for testing a unit root against the alternative of a mean reverting fractional unit root process. This t-statistic is based on the assumption that the errors are unconditionally homoskedastic. However, Busetti and Taylor (2003), McConnell and Perez-Quiros (2000), and van Dijk et al. (20...