We review the fossil records of spinosaurid dinosaurs in order to discuss this group’s evolution and distribution in Europe and North Africa during the Early Cretaceous. Along with their eastern Laurasian distribution during the Cretaceous, these theropods have been found in coastal deposits of Europe and North Africa dated from the Barremian to the Cenomanian. The main occurrences of spinosaur...

the sarcheshmeh formation is a shaly sequence of lower cretaceous age (aptian) which is deposited in koppeh-dagh sedimentary basin and conformably overlies and underlies the tirgan and sanghaneh formations respectively in the toos well # 1. lithologically, this formation has a thickness of 177m and consists mainly of marl, shale and shaly limestone. palynological studies resulted in identificat...

the investigated section cropping out in kuh-e-banesh, zagros basin (southern iran) is represented by limestone, cherty beds and marllevels bearing abundant planktonic foraminifers, radiolarian microfaunas, and ammonite imprints. for the first time, well to moderatelypreserved forms of planktonic foraminifera have been extracted from black shale and marls levels. extracted biota was studied wit...

Current carbon and sulphur isotope ratios (δ(13)C and δ(34)S) suggest there were major shifts in partitioning between reduced and oxidised reservoirs of carbon and sulphur during the Early Cretaceous. However, the δ(13)C and δ(34)S records are composed from different Ocean Drilling Program sites and are hard to correlate at high resolution. We present high-resolution Aptian δ(13)C(org) and δ(34...

Superplumes have been put forward as a driving mechanism for a variety of global phenomena, ranging from geomagnetic reversal anomalies to global climate warming via massive additions of volcanic CO2. Here I propose that rates of uplift caused by modern superplumes would result in the liberation of hundreds of Gt of carbon from methane clathrates on a timescale from tens to hundreds of millions...

Abstraet The amount and type of organic matter present in an exceptionally complete upper Aptian to lower Cenomanian sequence of sediments from ODP site 763 on the Exmouth Plateau has been determined. Organic carbon concentrations average 0.2~o. Organic matter is marine in origin, and its production and preservation was low over the ca. 20-million-year interval recorded by this sequence. Becaus...