We present molecular dating analyses for land plants that incorporate 33 fossil calibrations, permit rates of molecular evolution to be uncorrelated across the tree, and take into account uncertainties in phylogenetic relationships and the fossil record. We attached a prior probability to each fossil-based minimum age, and explored the effects of relying on the first appearance of tricolpate po...

New fossils from the latest Pliocene portion of the Tatrot Formation exposed in the Siwalik Hills of northern India represent the first fossil record of a darter (Anhingidae) from India. The darter fossils possibly represent a new species, but the limited information on the fossil record of this group restricts their taxonomic allocation. The Pliocene darter has a deep pit on the distal face of...

Through the lens of the fossil record, angiosperm diversification precipitated a Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR) in which pollinators, herbivores and predators underwent explosive co-diversification. Molecular dating studies imply that early angiosperm evolution is not documented in the fossil record. This mismatch remains controversial. We used a Bayesian molecular dating method to ana...

The fossil record provides the primary source of data for calibrating the origin of clades. Although minimum ages of clades are given by the oldest preserved fossil, these underestimate the true age, which must be bracketed by probabilistic methods based on multiple fossil occurrences. Although most of these methods assume uniform preservation rates, this assumption is unsupported over geologic...

A nuchal bone and a first left costal bone from two different individuals represent the first fossil record for the diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin. The bones are from a Pleistocene deposit at Edisto Beach, Colleton County, South Carolina, a locality that is within the present range of M. terrapin. Fossil Chrysemys nelsoni recovered from the same deposit indicate that the ranges of Ch...

The occurrence of a large number of fossil woods having resemblance in anatomical features with the modern palm genus, Phoenix L in Deccan Intertrappean fossil flora of Maastrichtian-Danian age (i. e. Late Cretaceous and Earliest Tertiary (65-67 my)) indicates the most primitive record of date palm. Present discovery of biocompounds from fossil wood of Phoenix collected from Deccan Intertrappea...

The bee fossil record is fragmentary, making it difficult to accurately estimate the antiquity of bee-mediated pollination. Here, we describe a bee fossil [Melittosphex burmensis (new species), Melittosphecidae (new family)] from Early Cretaceous Burmese amber (approximately 100 million years before the present). The fossil provides insights into the morphology of the earliest bees and provides...

Introduction Unlike most other groups of protists, dinoflagellates have left an extensive fossil record. This record is restricted essentially to the last 245 million years (Mesozoic and Cenozoic), though comparative anatomical and molecular phylogenetic studies of modern dinoflagellates indicate a probable Precambrian (greater than 570 million years) origin for the group. This Paleozoic (245-5...

Pterosaurs, a Mesozoic group of flying archosaurs, have become a focal point for debates pertaining to the impact of sampling biases on our reading of the fossil record, as well as the utility of sampling proxies in palaeodiversity reconstructions. The completeness of the pterosaur fossil specimens themselves potentially provides additional information that is not captured in existing sampling ...

Traditionally, Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils that cannot be allocated to Homo erectus sensu lato or modern H. sapiens have been assigned to different specific taxa. For example, in eastern Asia, these hominin fossils have been classified as archaic, early, or premodern H. sapiens. An increasing number of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils are currently being assigned to H. heidelbergensis....