The Fahliyan Formation of the Khami Group is the most important oil and gas reservoir in southwestern Iran. The formation attains a thickness of 435.5 m at the oil well X2 in Dorood oil field, Persian Gulf. It is represented mainly by thin-bedded limestones. This formation unconformably overlies the evaporate late Jurassic Hith Formation and conformably underlies the Gadvan Formation. Integrate...

Many palaeobiological analyses have concluded that modern birds (Neornithes) radiated no earlier than the Maastrichtian, whereas molecular clock studies have argued for a much earlier origination. Here, we assess the quality of the fossil record of Mesozoic avian species, using a recently proposed character completeness metric which calculates the percentage of phylogenetic characters that can ...

The holotype of Brancasaurus brancai is one of the most historically famous and anatomically complete Early Cretaceous plesiosaurian fossils. It derived from the Gerdemann & Co. brickworks clay pit near Gronau (Westfalen) in North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Germany. Stratigraphically this locality formed part of the classic European "Wealden facies," but is now more formally attributed to t...

Colymbosaurus is a genus of long-necked plesiosaurian represented by two valid species: C. megadeirus from the Upper Kimmeridge Clay Formation (Kimmeridgian–Tithonian) of the United Kingdom and C. svalbardensis from the Slottsmøya Member of the Agardhfjellet Formation (Tithonian–Berriasian) of Svalbard, Norway. Due to the lack of complete and articulated skeletons and a near absence of cranial ...

Eleven boreholes and one outcrop of the Lower Cretaceous in South Dobrogea (south-eastern Romania) were sampled for charophytes. Twenty species are described illustrated two non-marine rock units, Z?voaia Member Gherghina Formation. The contains a charophyte assemblage dominated by Feistiella bijuescensis, aff. Mesochara harrisii, Nodosoclavator bradleyi, Clavator bilateralis, grovesii var. gro...

Plate reconstructions of the Panthalassa Ocean typically portray a simple system diverging plates surrounded by active margins, yet geological and seismic tomographic records demonstrate that intra-oceanic subduction existed. Here, we reconstruct plate tectonic evolution pre-Cretaceous Oku-Niikappu island arc, remnants which are exposed on Hokkaido, Japan. This arc formed at Jurassic zone separ...

Taphonomy and mineralization of carbonated wood from the Purbeckian facies l'Usine, Cherves-Richemont (Charente). Lower Cretaceous deposits Charentes region, in southwestern France, correspond to continental brackish environments, locally rich evaporitic formations (Manès 1850; Pouech et al. 2006, 2014, 2015; Schnyder 2012; Vullo 2014; Moreau 2017b). Three fossiliferous localities have been pre...