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42 ontemporary political summits and policy decisions, like those at Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro and the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols, are clear evidence that world leaders and their communities are increasingly concerned about the Earth’s climate and its future. Policy makers frequently turn to scientists for definitive answers and pragmatic solutions to climate problems and too often focu...

– The joint quantification of disparity and diversity is an important aspect of recent macroevolutionary studies, and is usually motivated by theoretical considerations on the pace of innovation and the filling of morphospace. In practice, varying protocols of data collection and analysis have rendered comparisons among studies difficult. The basic question remains, how sensitive is any given d...

s Volume for the Krakow Congress (in Volumina Jurassica no. 4, 2006). The Working Group members were then asked in a two-point ballot: (1) That the Flodigarry section, Staffin Bay, Isle of Skye, Scotland be proposed as the GSSP section; (2) Either that the Pictonia flodigarriense Horizon or the Pictonia densicostata Horizon should be the primary marker for recognition and correlation of the bas...

Subduction zones are the primary regions on Earth today where crust recycling takes place, and through geological time they have been the sites of continent formation. Many of the key elements (e.g., Th, rare earth elements, Ba, and Be) that are important in understanding crustal growth are sequestered in the sedimentary column and in the uppermost oxidized portions of the volcanic section of o...

Dating analyses based on molecular data imply that crown angiosperms existed in the Triassic, long before their undisputed appearance in the fossil record in the Early Cretaceous. Following a re-analysis of the age of angiosperms using updated sequences and fossil calibrations, we use a series of simulations to explore the possibility that the older age estimates are a consequence of (i) major ...