A 13-million-year continuous record of Oligocene climate from the equatorial Pacific reveals a pronounced "heartbeat" in the global carbon cycle and periodicity of glaciations. This heartbeat consists of 405,000-, 127,000-, and 96,000-year eccentricity cycles and 1.2-million-year obliquity cycles in periodically recurring glacial and carbon cycle events. That climate system response to intricat...

The fossil record and systematics of phlebotomid sand flies, vectors of leishmaniasis and arbovirus in several regions of the world, strongly support that living genera existed long before the Oligocene (38 million years, myr). A common Phlebotominae ancestor was present in the Triassic period before the separations of continents (248 myr).

Age, geochemical composition, and distribution of Oligocene ignimbrites in the northern Sierra Nevada, California: implications for landscape morphology, elevation, and drainage divide geography of the Nevadaplano Elizabeth J. Cassel a; Andrew T. Calvert b; Stephan A. Graham a a Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA b United States Geologica...

A recent study in BMC Evolutionary Biology has reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of a large Mediterranean cave-dwelling beetle clade, revealing an ancient origin and strong geographic structuring. It seems likely that diversification of this clade in the Oligocene was seeded by an ancestor already adapted to subterranean life.

The Fayum Depression of Egypt has yielded fossils of hystricognathous rodents from multiple Eocene and Oligocene horizons that range in age from ∼37 to ∼30 Ma and document several phases in the early evolution of crown Hystricognathi and one of its major subclades, Phiomorpha. Here we describe two new genera and species of basal phiomorphs, Birkamys korai and Mubhammys vadumensis, based on rost...

The ensign wasp genus Hyptia Illiger was previously known from 52 extant New World species and one fossil species from Lower Miocene to Upper Oligocene Mexican amber. Hyptia hennigi sp. nov., from Eocene Baltic amber, is the oldest known species and the first member of the genus from the Old World.

13 Ž . New records of the abundance of C in marine organic matter have been compiled for i the later Neoproterozoic, from Ž . Ž . Ž . Ž . 800 to 543 Ma 346 analyses , ii the Cambrian through the Jurassic 1616 analyses , and iii the Cretaceous and Cenozoic Ž . 13 2493 analyses . Comparison of these to existing compilations of the abundance of C in sedimentary carbonates has Ž . allowed developme...

Astronomical tuning of sediment sequences requires both unambiguous cycle pattern recognition in climate proxy records and astronomical solutions, as well as independent information about the phase relationship between these two. Here we present two different astronomically tuned age models for the Oligocene–Miocene transition (OMT) from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Site U1334 (equatorial ...

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...