Tertiary insects and arachnids have been virtually unknown from the vast western Amazonian basin. We report here the discovery of amber from this region containing a diverse fossil arthropod fauna (13 hexapod families and 3 arachnid species) and abundant microfossil inclusions (pollen, spores, algae, and cyanophyceae). This unique fossil assemblage, recovered from middle Miocene deposits of nor...

In situ preservation of mud shrimps of the family Callianassidae (Decapoda: Axiidea) has rarely been noted in the fossil record. The present contribution reports body fossils of four members of the family (“Callianassa” almerai, “C.” pseudorakosensis, “C.” sp. 1 and “C.” sp. 2) which are apparently preserved within their burrows, all from middle Miocene deposits of Austria, Slovakia and Hungary...

Fluid pressures in Miocene-Pleistocene sediments of the US mid-Atlantic continental slope approach the lithostatic stress and are an important control on the stability of the slope. Fluid pressures in excess of hydrostatic were generated by regional depositional patterns and sedimentation rates. Fluid migration within porous and permeable Miocene silty sand layers redistributed pressure and gen...

During the Oligo-Miocene, major phases of phosphogenesis occurred in the Earth's oceans. However, most phosphate deposits represent condensed or allochthonous hemipelagic deposits, formed by complex physical and chemical enrichment processes, limiting their applicability for the study regarding the temporal pacing of Miocene phosphogenesis. The Oligo-Miocene Decontra section located on the Maie...

—The subfamily Equinae in the Great Plains region of North America underwent a dramatic radiation and subsequent decline as climate changed from warm and humid in the middle Miocene to cooler and more arid conditions during the late Miocene. Here we use ecological niche modeling (ENM), specifically the GARP (Genetic Algorithm using Rule-set Prediction) modeling system, to reconstruct the geogra...

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A shortage of Cenozoic vertebrate fossils in the Tibetan Plateau has been an obstacle in our understanding of biological evolution in response to changes in tectonism, topography, and environment. This is especially true for Paleogene records, so far known by only two sites along the northern rim of the Plateau. We report a Hongyazi Basin in northern Tibetan Plateau that produces at least three...

We reconstructed the phylogeny of the subfamily Viverrinae (Mammalia, Carnivora, Viverridae) using a approximately 3kb data set in order to reassess timing and patterns of faunal exchanges between Asia and Africa. Maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian analyses of separated and combined matrices (cytochrome b, transthyretin intron I and IRBP exon 1 [IRBP1]) recovered all the well-s...

[1] Proxy data constraining land and ocean surface paleotemperatures indicate that the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO), a global warming event at 15 Ma, had a global annual mean surface temperature of 18.4 C, about 3 C higher than present and equivalent to the warming predicted for the next century. We apply the latest National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere M...