PALEONTOLOGY AND THE EXPLOITATION of natural resources, particularly coal and limestone, have an old and firmly established connection. This is especially important in deposits of Pennsylvanian age, where coal mining has helped to fill the collection drawers of museums and universities across North America and Europe. Unlike most natural exposures, those created by mining frequently reveal whol...

OVERVIEW On Earth, natural glasses are typically produced by rapid cooling of melts, and as in the case minerals rocks, can provide key information on evolution Earth. However, products not solely terrestrial, different formation mechanisms give rise to a variety amorphous materials. In this chapter, we an overview non-magmatic origin their mechanisms. We focus formed other than magmatic activi...

BACKGROUND There have been numerous studies on dinosaur biogeographic distribution patterns. However, these distribution data have not yet been applied to ecological questions. Ecological studies of dinosaurs have tended to focus on reconstructing individual taxa, usually through comparisons to modern analogs. Fewer studies have sought to determine if the ecological structure of fossil assembla...

This monograph has been compiled by members of the Paleogene Planktonic Foraminifera Working Group (hereafter referred to as the Working Group) of the International Subcommission on Paleogene Stratigraphy, International Union of Geological Sciences. It is the second such work in a projected series of three, the first being the Atlas of Paleocene Planktonic Foraminifera published by Smithsonian ...

The diversity of fungi in permanently frozen soil from northeastern Siberia was studied by culture-independent PCR amplification of diverse environmental 18S rRNA genes. Elaborate protocols to avoid contamination during drilling, sampling, and amplification were used. A broad diversity of eukaryotic DNA sequences that were 510 bp long, including sequences of various fungi, plants, and invertebr...

Vertebrate microfossil assemblages in terrestrial formations are a promising source of data on the structure of fossil metacommunities. However, the degree to which these deposits capture true, metacommunity-level samples is unknown. Individual deposits may be biased in ways that limit their utility for intraand inter-formation comparisons. This study describes the composition of ten vertebrate...

The Xenarthra were the most successful South American mammals to participate in the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) and representatives of each family dispersed to at least the middle latitudes in North America. The ability of xenarthrans to insinuate themselves into the North American fauna suggests their ecology was sufficiently different from endemic North American taxa to avoid dir...