f America is to produce great painters, " wrote great American painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), young artists should " remain in America to peer deeper into the heart of American life " (1). Eakins traveled abroad, where he became familiar with the work of 19th-century greats Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas, but returned home to become a master of realism whose exactness and p...

-Recent expeditions to the Lake Palankarinna rea of South Australia resulted in the oldest and only known extinct skink genus in Australia. The holotype of a new genus and species, Proegernia palankarinnensis, was collected from the basal portion of the Late Oligocene Etadunna Formation from the Minkina Local Fauna. Additional scincid fossils previously recovered from higher levels in the forma...