During the Miocene period, from 25 to 12 million years ago, climate change drove plants and animals to evolve toward their modern forms and distribution. The fossil and geological records show considerable fluctuation in global temperature during this time, but not all proxies for atmospheric CO2 data show a link between CO2 and Miocene climate. Wolfram Kürschner et al. tap a new source of CO2 ...

A new fossil filefish, Aluterus shigensis sp. nov., with a close resemblance to the extant Aluterus scriptus (Osbeck), is described from the Middle Miocene Bessho Formation in Nagano Prefecture, central Japan. It is characterized by: 21 total vertebrae; very slender and long first dorsal spine with tiny anterior barbs; thin and lancet-shaped basal pterygiophore of the spiny dorsal fin, with its...

The Urumaco stratigraphic sequence, western Venezuela, preserves a variety of paleoenvironments that include terrestrial, riverine, lacustrine and marine facies. A wide range of fossil vertebrates associated with these facies supports the hypothesis of an estuary in that geographic area connected with a hydrographic system that flowed from western Amazonia up to the Proto-Caribbean Sea during t...

Fossil Diodontidae in Tropical America consist mostly of isolated and fused beak-like jawbones, and tooth plate batteries. These durophagous fishes are powerful shell-crushing predators on shallow water invertebrate faunas from Neogene tropical carbonate bottom, rocky reefs and surrounding flats. We use an ontogenetic series of high-resolution micro CT of fossil and extant species to recognize ...

Integrated pseudosection modeling and monazite petrochronology of paragneiss from the Kanchenjunga region of northeastern Nepal reveal the presence of cryptic tectonometamorphic discontinuities within the Himalayan metamorphic core. These new data outline a series of thrust-sense structures that juxtapose rocks that generally record a protracted history of early Eocene to latest Oligocene–early...

Global climate underwent a major reorganization when the Antarctic ice sheet expanded ~14 million years ago (Ma) (1). This event affected global atmospheric circulation, including the strength and position of the westerlies and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and, therefore, precipitation patterns (2-5). We present new shallow-marine sediment records from the continental shelf of Aus...

Piggyback basins on the margins of growing orogens commonly serve as sensitive recorders of the onset of thrust deformation and changes in source areas. The Bieertuokuoyi piggyback basin, located in the hanging wall of the Pamir Frontal Thrust, provides an unambiguous record of the outward growth of the northeast Pamir margin in northwest China from the Miocene through the Quaternary. To recons...

The area and elevation of the Tibetan Plateau over time has directly affected Asia's topography, the characteristics of the Asian monsoon, and modified global climate, but in ways that are poorly understood. Charting the uplift history is crucial for understanding the mechanisms that link elevation and climate irrespective of time and place. While some palaeoelevation data are available for sou...

Exceptionally well-preserved skulls and postcranial elements of a new species of the plesiomorphic stem macropodiform Balbaroo have been recovered from middle Miocene freshwater limestone deposits in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area of northwestern Queensland, Australia. This constitutes the richest intraspecific sample for any currently known basal "kangaroo", and, along with additional mat...

[1] Proxy data constraining land and ocean surface paleotemperatures indicate that the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO), a global warming event at 15 Ma, had a global annual mean surface temperature of 18.4 C, about 3 C higher than present and equivalent to the warming predicted for the next century. We apply the latest National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere M...