Zoophycos is a complex three dimensional trace fossil that is abundant in deep ocean sediments worldwide, but has not been described previously from Cenozoic continental margin deposits of Antarctica. In the ANDRILL 1B core drilled through the northwest McMurdo ice shelf, Zoophycos occurs in a 17m thick unit of interglacial sediments bounded above and below by glacial surfaces of erosion. This ...

A fossil discovery in the mid-Cretaceous Blackleaf Formation of southwest Montana, USA, has yielded the first trace and body fossil evidence of burrowing behaviour in a dinosaur. Skeletal remains of an adult and two juveniles of Oryctodromeus cubicularis gen. et sp. nov. a new species of hypsilophodont-grade dinosaur, were found in the expanded distal chamber of a sediment-filled burrow. Corres...

Abstract The Nasep and Huns members of the Urusis Formation (Nama Group), southern Namibia, preserve some most diverse trace-fossil assemblages known from latest Ediacaran worldwide, including potentially world's oldest “complex” vertical sediment-penetrating burrows. These sediments record relatively communities bilaterian metazoans existing before base Cambrian an increase in intensity metazo...

A broad variety of body plans and subplans appear during a period of perhaps 8 million years (my) within the Early Cambrian, an unequaled explosion of morphological novelty, the ancestral lineages represented chiefly or entirely by trace fossils. Evidence from the fossil record can be combined with that from molecular phylogenetic trees to suggest that the last common ancestor of (i) protostome...

One of the strongest paleontological arguments in favor of the origin of bilaterally symmetrical animals (Bilateria) prior to their obvious and explosive appearance in the fossil record in the early Cambrian, 542 million years ago, is the occurrence of trace fossils shaped like elongated sinuous grooves or furrows in the Precambrian. Being restricted to the seafloor surface, these traces are re...

[Abstract] Olfactory memory is an ethologically relevant task that relies on a mouse’s innate ability to use olfaction to forage for food (Zou et al., 2015), and identify safe foods. Although many of the same brain areas involved in other forms of memory are also involved in olfactory memory, the mechanisms are different (Sanchez-Andrade et al., 2005; Tong et al., 2014). Here, we describe one w...

The Silurian was an interval of profound change in terrestrial ecosystems as the earliest non-marine animal communities began to become established on continents. Whilst much is known about transition pioneering animals from shallow-marine coastal and alluvial habitats, evidence for activity contemporaneous aeolian strata rare. Here, we present trace fossil that closes this knowledge gap, indic...