The origins of South America's exceptional plant diversity are poorly known from the fossil record. We report on unbiased quantitative collections of fossil floras from Laguna del Hunco (LH) and Río Pichileufú (RP) in Patagonia, Argentina. These sites represent a frost-free humid biome in South American middle latitudes of the globally warm Eocene. At LH, from 4,303 identified specimens, we rec...

The Eocene-Oligocene Boundary (~34 million years ago) marks one of the largest extinctions of marine invertebrates in the world oceans and of mammalian fauna in Europe and Asia in the Cenozoic era. A shift to a cooler climate across this boundary has been suggested as the cause of this extinction in the marine environment, but there is no manifold evidence for a synchronous turnover of flora, f...

BACKGROUND The Eocene was the warmest epoch of the Cenozoic and recorded the appearance of several orders of modern mammals, including the first occurrence of Euprimates. During the Eocene, Euprimates were mainly represented by two groups, adapiforms and omomyiforms, which reached great abundance and diversity in the Northern Hemisphere. Despite this relative abundance, the record of early Eoce...

Quantitative analysis of all well-preserved crania of Adapis magnus (n = 8) and Adapis parisiensis (n = 12) together with maxillary and mandibular dentitions preserving canines corroborates Stehlin's hypothesis that Adapis was sexually dimorphic. Males are from 13% to 16% larger than females in cranial length, corresponding to a weight dimorphism estimated at 44% to 56%, and have relatively bro...

Jones and Ewing (1) have presented seismic profiler data from the Bay of Biscay which allows a 120 anticlockwise rotation of the Iberian peninsula between Eocene and Middle to Upper Miocene times. They refer several times to the fact that this va'ue is appreciably less than a rotation of 220, which they believe resulted from our paleomagnetic study of the Lisbon Volcanics (2). We must point out...

Xiphiorhynchus kimblalocki, a new species of extinct billfish from the Eocene of Mississippi, is described. This is the first record of Xiphiorhynchus outside of western Europe, and the material consists of a well-preserved rostrum, three partial vertebrae and two fin spine fragments. Xiphiorhynchus kimblalocki is compared with other living and extinct billfish and appears to be intermediate in...

An adult of a Ribbed Cocoon Maker Moth (Bucculatricidae) from Eocene Baltic amber is described as a new species (Bucculatrix rycki). This is the first description of a fossil adult of this microlepidopteran family, but previous evidence for this family comes from typical leaf mines in fossil leaves that provide evidence dating to the Upper Cretaceous. The minimal geological age for this adult s...

The enigmatic species Eolestes syntheticus Cockerell, 1940, from the Early Eocene of North America, previously attributed to the lestoid family Synlestidae, is re-examined in light of the discovery of new material from the Middle Eocene Kishenehn Formation in northwestern Montana. E. syntheticus and a new species, Eolestes ramosus sp. n., are attributed to a new family Eolestidae fam. n.. In ad...