Exciting evidence from diverse fields, including physiology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, geosciences and molecular genetics, is providing an increasingly secure basis for robustly formulating and evaluating hypotheses concerning the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO(2)) in the evolution of photosynthetic eukaryotes. Such studies span over a billion years of evolutionary change, fr...

An emerging theme of modern composites and devices is the coupling of nanostructural properties of materials with their targeted arrangement at the microscale. Of the imaging techniques developed that provide insight into such designer materials and devices, those based on diffraction are particularly useful. However, to date, these have been heavily restrictive, providing information only on m...

C. D. Sherborn published in 1940, under the imprint of Cambridge University Press but at his own expense, Where is the - Collection? This idiosyncratic listing of named natural science collections, and their fates, was useful, but incomplete, and uneven in its accuracy. It is argued that those defects were inevitable, given Sherborn's age and wartime conditions, and that what might seem one of ...

. Figure 1. Cambrian lobopodian diversity. (A) Aysheaia pedunculata, middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (NMNH-83942). (B) Claws of Aysheaia pedunculata (NMNH-365608). (C) Hallucigenia sparsa, middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (NMNH198658; courtesy of M. Smith, University of Cambridge. Nature 523, 75–78). (D) Microdictyon sinicum, early Cambrian Chengjiang (ELRC-30060; courtesy of G. Edgecombe, Natural H...

The occurrence of the genus Prolagus Pomel, 1853, in North Africa provides some strongest evidence for existence faunal exchanges between Europe and Africa. oldest African remains have been reported from Messinian locality Afoud Aït Kandoula Basin (6.2 Ma), identified during previous studies as species michauxi López-Martínez, 1975. Dental material already analyzed AF12-1 AF12-2 levels new coll...

The Animal Kingdom is an astonishingly diverse group. Together with plants and fungi one of the three major lineages multicellular eukaryotes. Due to anthropocentrism and/or genuine scientific interest, their origin diversification are pivotal modern evolutionary biology. In last few decades, dramatic technological advances in molecular biology computational power have generated new phylogeneti...