The large marine pachypleurosaur sauropterygian Serpianosaurus germanicus nov. spec., representing the oldest well known record of this genus from the Pelsonian, is introduced based on a postcranial skeleton. Of younger age are the Serpianosaurus mirigolensis (Rieppel, 1989) specimens from the Illyrian/Fassanian boundary (Grenzbitumen Bed) of the northwestern Tethys (Monte San Giorgio). Additio...

A measured magnetozone sequence defined by 24 sampling sites with normal polarity and 28 sites with reverse polarity characteristic magnetizations was established for the heretofore poorly age-constrained Los Colorados Formation and its dinosaur-bearing vertebrate fauna in the Ischigualasto-Villa Union continental rift basin of Argentina. The polarity pattern in this ∼600-m-thick red-bed sectio...

In 1912 Prof. Pierre Termier, the director of the Geological Survey of France, delivered before the Oceanographic Institute of Paris a very interesting and stimulating lecture on the probable existence of Plato's Atlantis. This lecture is now published in English in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1915 (1916), pages 219-234. In his lecture the speaker drew a conclusion that...

The climate of the Holocene is not well suited to be the baseline for the climate of the planet. It is an interglacial, a state typical of only 10% of the past few million years. It is a time of relative sea-level stability after a rapid 130-m rise from the lowstand during the last glacial maximum. Physical geologic processes are operating at unusual rates and much of the geochemical system is ...