James William Kitching collected and studied fossils of dinosaurs and early humans [3] in the twentieth century. He worked at the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research in South Africa. During the fifty-three years he worked at the institute, Kitching spent eighteen of those in the field uncovering fossils. Kitching recovered fossils of early human ancestors, later called Australo...

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 55.8 Ma), an abrupt global warming event linked to a transient increase in pCO2, was comparable in rate and magnitude to modern anthropogenic climate change. Here we use plant fossils from the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming to document the combined effects of temperature and pCO2 on insect herbivory. We examined 5,062 fossil leaves from five sites positione...

The first authentic weevil fossils known from Australia, and the oldest known from the southern hemisphere, are described and illustrated on the basis of two specimens recovered from the Upper-Jurassic Talbragar Fish Bed in New South Wales. Talbragarus averyi gen. et sp. n. is classified in the family Nemonychidae based on the presence of scutellary strioles on the elytra, the length and insert...

Rapid global warming of 5 degrees to 10 degrees C during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) coincided with major turnover in vertebrate faunas, but previous studies have found little floral change. Plant fossils discovered in Wyoming, United States, show that PETM floras were a mixture of native and migrant lineages and that plant range shifts were large and rapid (occurring within 10,...

Age estimation from molecular sequences has emerged as a powerful tool for inferring when a plant lineage arrived in a particular area. Knowing the tenure of lineages within a region is key to understanding the evolution of traits, the evolution of biotic interactions, and the evolution of floras. New analytical methods model change in substitution rates along individual branches of a phylogene...

Plant fossil-bearing mudstones of Jurassic age are present in a small faulted basin within the Precambrian basement rocks at Tabbowa village, in the North Western province of Sri Lanka. The present study was conducted in the Tabbowa sedimentary beds and reports discovery of two new plant species that could probably be affiliated to Otozamites of Bennettitales group that prevailed in the Jurassi...

A long-standing problem in paleobotany is the accurate identification of the growth habits and statures of fossil plants. Tissue-specific analysis of stable carbon isotope ratios in plant fossils can provide an independent perspective on this issue. Lignin, a fundamental biopolymer providing structural support in plant tissues and the second most abundant organic material in plants, is C deplet...