The Lhasa terrane is a key region for understanding the paleoelevation of the southern Tibetan Plateau after India-Asia collision. The Gerze Basin, located in the northern part of the Lhasa terrane, is a shortening-related basin. We discovered Lagena laevis (Bandy) fossils in upper Eocene strata of the Gerze Basin. This type of foraminifera is associated with lagoon and estuarine environments, ...

Fossil records indicate that the genus Pinus L. split into two subgenera by the Late Cretaceous, although subgenus Strobus (D. Don) Lemmon is less well documented than subgenus Pinus L., especially in eastern Asia. In this paper, Pinus maomingensis sp. nov. is established based on a compressed seed cone from the upper Eocene of the Maoming Basin of southern China. This species is attributed to ...

[1] Quasi‐periodic variation in sea‐surface temperature, precipitation, and sea‐level pressure in the equatorial Pacific known as the El Niño – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important mode of interannual variability in global climate. A collapse of the tropical Pacific onto a state resembling a so‐called ‘permanent El Niño’, with a preferentially warmed eastern equatorial Pacific, flatter t...

[1] Uppermost Cretaceous to Eocene marine sedimentary sequences occur both to the south and north of the Yarlung Zangbo suture in south central Tibet. They consist of Indian-margin strata of the northern Tethyan Himalaya and Asian-margin strata of the Gangdese forearc. Both assemblages are characterized by major changes in depositional environment and sedimentary provenance at 65 Ma and an appe...

Previous workers identified a magnetically anomalous clay layer deposited on the northern United States Atlantic Coastal Plain during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The finding inspired the highly controversial hypothesis that a cometary impact triggered the PETM. Here we present ferromagnetic resonance (FMR), isothermal and anhysteretic remanent magnetization, first order reversa...

Although chrysophyte stomatocysts have a fossil record that likely extends to the lower Cretaceous, to date neither scales nor bristles of the scaled chrysophyte genera older than Holocene have been reported. This leaves the origin of this important group of freshwater algae a mystery. We discovered abundant and diverse scaled chrysophyte microfossils in ca. 47 Ma sediments (Middle Eocene, Lute...

The genus Castanea (Fagaceae) is widely distributed in the deciduous forests of the Northern Hemisphere. The striking similarity between the floras of eastern Asia and those of eastern North America and the difference in chestnut blight resistance among species has been of interest to botanists for a century. To infer the biogeographical history of the genus, the phylogeny of Castanea was estim...

Phylogenetic relationships among and within major groups of bees are still poorly resolved. The main gap is the identification of the basal branch of bee phylogeny. In this context, more information is needed about the early fossil record of bees. Here, we describe Palaeomacropis eocenicus gen. nov. sp. nov. , discovered in early Eocene amber of Oise (France). It is the oldest record of Melitti...

Past greenhouse periods with elevated atmospheric CO2 were characterized by globally warmer sea-surface temperatures (SST). However, the extent to which the high latitudes warmed to a greater degree than the tropics (polar amplification) remains poorly constrained, in particular because there are only a few temperature reconstructions from the tropics. Consequently, the relationship between inc...

The late Eocene prosimian Wadilemur elegans from the Jebel Qatrani Formation, northern Egypt, was originally interpreted as an anchomomyin adapiform primate based on limited information from the lower molars and distal premolars. Recently recovered fossils attributable to this species, including a proximal femur, the fourth upper premolar and first and second upper molars, and a mandible preser...