New records of the Oligo-Miocene mekosuchine crocodylian, Baru, from Queensland and the Northern Territory are described. Baru wickeni and Baru darrowi are accepted as valid species in the genus and their diagnoses are revised. Both species are present in Queensland and the Northern Territory but are restricted in time, with B. wickeni known from the late Oligocene and B. darrowi from the middl...

Rodents are the most speciose group of mammals and display a great ecological diversity. Despite the greater amount of ecomorphological information compiled for extant rodent species, studies usually lack of morphological data on dentition, which has led to difficulty in directly utilizing existing ecomorphological data of extant rodents for paleoecological reconstruction because teeth are the ...

Australian Oligo-Miocene mekosuchines (Crocodylia; Crocodyloidea) display wide diversity in cranial shape and inferred hunting strategies. Terrestrial habitus has been inferred for these distinctive predators. A direct morphological signal for locomotion can be expected in the postcrania, particularly the pelvic and pectoral girdles. Here we describe fossil materials of the girdles, which chart...

Bandicoots (Peramelemorphia) are a major order of australidelphian marsupials, which despite a fossil record spanning at least the past 25 million years and a pandemic Australasian range, remain poorly understood in terms of their evolutionary relationships. Many living peramelemorphians are critically endangered, making this group an important focus for biological and conservation research. To...

Understanding the diversification of polyploid crops in the circum-Mediterranean region is a challenging issue in evolutionary biology. Sequence data of three nuclear genes and three plastid DNA fragments from 109 accessions of Avena L. (Poaceae) and the outgroups were used for maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses. The evolution of cultivated oat (Avena sativa L.) and its close relatives wa...

Fossil catfishes from fluvio-lacustrine facies of late Miocene Urumaco, early Pliocene Castilletes and late Pliocene San Gregorio formations provide evidence of a hydrographic connection in what is today desert regions of northern Colombia and Venezuela. New discoveries and reevaluation of existing materials leads to the recognition of two new records of the pimelodid Brachyplatystoma cf. vaill...

Locating breeding sites is definitely a key to understanding the ecological requirements and maintaining the sustainability of populations/species. Here I re-examined published specimens of an extinct baleen whale, Parietobalaena yamaokai, from the lower part of Itahashi Formation (16.1-15.6 Ma, Middle Miocene) in Shobara, Hiroshima, Japan. A critical and previously unnoticed feature, the open ...

On the basis of industrial computed tomography, relative enamel thickness (RET) is computed in three Middle Miocene (ca 11.9-11.8 Ma) hominoids from Abocador de Can Mata (Vallès-Penedès Basin, Catalonia, Spain): Pierolapithecus catalaunicus from BCV1 and Anoiapithecus brevirostris from C3-Aj, interpreted as stem hominids; and Dryopithecus fontani from C3-Ae of uncertain phylogenetic affinities....

Pliocene and Quaternary tectonic structures mainly consisting of segmented northwest–southeast normal faults, and associated seismicity in the central Betics do not agree with the transpressive tectonic nature of the Africa–Eurasia plate boundary in the Ibero-Maghrebian region. Active extensional deformation here is heterogeneous, individual segmented normal faults being linked by relay ramps a...

We report isotopic and chemical compositions of unusual tridymite–hercynite xenoliths in middle Miocene Niutoushan tholeiites from the southeast coastal area of China. These xenoliths are characterized by positive cerium (Ce) anomalies and extremely high Al2O3 (32–34 wt.%) and total iron oxide (20–22%). They have Sr/Sr of 0.7050–0.7058, eNd(0) values of + 3.2 to + 4.2, Pb/Pb ratios of 18.8–19.1...