Rocks exposed west of the Coast Plutonic Complex in southern southeast Alaska form an imbricate thrust belt that overprints the tectonic boundary between two of the largest allochthonous crustal fragments in the North American Cordillera, the Insular and Intermontane composite terranes. In the Alexander terrane (Insular composite terrane), lower Paleozoic metavolcanic and metasedimentary rocks ...

The phylogenetic positions of frogs, salamanders, and caecilians have been difficult to establish. Data matrices based primarily on Paleozoic taxa support a monophyletic origin of all Lissamphibia but have resulted in widely divergent hypotheses of the nature of their common ancestor. Analysis that concentrates on the character states of the stem taxa of the extant orders, in contrast, suggests...

Two distinct traditions exist in the study of ancient ichnofaunas, which may be termed the ethological (invertebrate ichnology) and the biotaxonomic (tetrapod ichnology). Consequently, there are two different kinds of ichnofacies, each peculiar to one tradition, and we term them ethoichnofacies (invertebrate ichnofacies) and biotaxonichnofacies (tetrapod ichnofacies). In the Paleozoic, the Chel...

The Upper Ordovician Trenton Group of New York State is one of a number of Appalachian limestones which yields paleomagnetic poles suggesting disturbance in the late Paleozoic. Calcite fractions dissolved from samples of a 238U 206pb a e of 454+8 Ma the Trenton Limestone define g (MSWD = 12.8) in excellent agreement with 40Ar-39Ar and U-Pb ages for the deposition of the underlying Diecke Benton...

Both the gradual rise in atmospheric oxygen over the Proterozoic Eon as well as episodic fluctuations in oxygen over several million-year time spans during the Phanerozoic Era, have arguably exerted strong selective forces on cellular and organismic respiratory specialization and evolution. The rise in atmospheric oxygen, some 2 billion years after the origin of life, dramatically altered cell ...