Tarumania walkerae is a rare fossorial freshwater fish species from the lower Rio Negro, Central Amazonia, composing monotypic and recently described family Tarumaniidae. The has been proposed as sister group of Erythrinidae by both morphological molecular studies despite distinct arrangements superfamily Erythrinoidea within Characiformes. Recent phylogenomic time-calibrated analyses characoid...

Mitchell et al. argue that divergence-time estimates for our avian phylogeny were too young because of an “inappropriate” maximum age constraint for the most recent common ancestor of modern birds and that, as a result, most modern bird orders diverged before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event 66million years ago instead of after. However, their interpretations of the fossil record ...

Jarvis et al. (Research Articles, 12 December 2014, p. 1320) presented molecular clock analyses that suggested that most modern bird orders diverged just after the mass extinction event at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (about 66 million years ago). We demonstrate that this conclusion results from the use of a single inappropriate maximum bound, which effectively precludes the Cretaceous div...

This review article summarizes the recent work done in India on fossil vertebrates from the Mesozoic-early Paleogene interval, with focus on the past five years. Advances made during this period highlight the importance of India’s vertebrate fossil record in our understanding of the origin and evolutionary history of several vertebrate groups and the dynamics of intercontinental faunal dispersa...

Molecular phylogeny suggests a close relationship of Asteraceae to the early evolution of Golovinomyces. The family Asteraceae, with a geographic origin in South America, expanded into the Northern Hemisphere, where it may have been infected by an ancestor of Golovinomyces, thus starting a close hosteparasite relationship. Using this event as a calibration point, we designed molecular clocks fo...

The mass extinction of life 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary, marked by the extinctions of dinosaurs and shallow marine organisms, is important because it led to the macroevolution of mammals and appearance of humans. The current hypothesis for the extinction is that an asteroid impact in present-day Mexico formed condensed aerosols in the stratosphere, which caused the...

Silicon isotope ratios (expressed as δSi) in marine microfossils can provide insights into silica cycling over geologic time. Here we used δSi of sponge spicules and radiolarian tests from the Paleogene Equatorial Transect (Ocean Drilling Program Leg 199) spanning the Eocene and Oligocene (~50–23 Ma) to reconstruct dissolved silica (DSi) concentrations in deep waters and to examine upper ocean ...

Abstract Ray-finned fishes comprise nearly half of extant vertebrate species and include several ancient lineages with fossil records that stretch over 200 Myr in time. One these old clades, the sturgeons paddlefishes, is distributed across Northern Hemisphere includes some largest known freshwater fishes. Yet, record this lineage (Acipenseriformes) poor compared to similarly ray-finned fish cl...

BACKGROUND Bothremydidae is a clade of extinct pleurodiran turtles known from the Cretaceous to Paleogene of Africa, Europe, India, Madagascar, and North and South America. The group is most diverse during the Late Cretaceous to Paleogene of Africa. Little is known, however, about the early evolution of the group. METHODS We here figure and describe a fossil turtle from early Late Cretaceous ...