The appearance of monodactyl equids in Eurasia and their dispersal towards South Europe is a significant event that marks the beginning of the Quaternary period. During the Pleistocene, horses were a common element in most European large mammal faunal assemblages, providing important palaeoecological clues, but their taxonomy, nomenclature and phylogeny, as well as their actual biochronological...

Oceanic islands are renowned for the profound scientific insights that their fascinating biotas have provided to biologists during the past two centuries. Research presented at Island Biology 2014-an international conference, held in Honolulu, Hawaii (7-11 July 2014), which attracted 253 presenters and 430 participants from at least 35 countries(1)-demonstrated that islands are reclaiming a lea...

The Pennsylvanian flora from the intramontane Erillcastell Basin in eastern Pyrenees (Catalonia, Spain) is described a palaeoenvironmental context based on combined study of sedimentology, plant taphonomy and paleoecology. This basin differs other Pyrenean basins this age comprising wide array fluvial channel floodplain-related facies, with limited development peat mire facies. Both late Moscov...

Scant scientific attention has been given to the abundance and distribution of marine biota in the face of the lower sea level, and steeper latitudinal gradient in climate, during the ice-age conditions that have dominated the past million years. Here we examine the glacial persistence of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) populations using two ecological-niche-models (ENM) and the first broad synthes...

The deposits of the Carnian Kasımlar Formation within the Taurus Platform Units of south-western Turkey represent an important archive of a Late Triassic ecosystem. New palaeontological information was obtained by analysing the Kasimlarceltites mass occurrence, located within the Kasımlar Formation and named after the Lower Carnian (Julian) ammonoid genus Kasimlarceltites. This is the dominant ...

Testate amoebae analysis has been shown to be a valuable technique to reconstruct peatland palaeohydrology and thereby past climate change. However there is cause for concern over the potential impact of differential preservation on the record. To investigate the impact of various environmental factors a sequence of Sphagnum samples were subjected to treatment with weak acid, nutrient enrichmen...

The fossil record presents palaeoecological patterns of rise and fall on multiple scales of time and biological organization. Here, we argue that the rise and fall of species can result from a tragedy of the commons, wherein the pursuit of self-interests by individual agents in a larger interactive system is detrimental to the overall performance or condition of the system. Species evolving wit...

Palynology is a long established and respected branch of environmental science that has been applied to criminal investigation in a meaningful way only in recent years. It has proved to be remarkably versatile in many kinds of criminal enquiry. It is not, however, an absolute science; palynological data are on a par with the suites of symptoms which allow medical practitioners to make diagnoses...