INTRODUCTION Geological evolution of the Amazon Basin. The geological history of lowland Amazonia is still poorly understood, in part because much of the Tertiary stratigraphic history has been removed by erosion and that which remains is difficult to study and access in a rainforest environment. The landscape evolution of Amazonia during the Neogene was influenced mainly by Andean tectonics an...

Temporal variations in the orientation of Cenozoic range growth in northeastern Tibet defi ne two modes by which India-Asia convergence was accommodated. Thermochronological age-elevation transects from the hanging walls of two major thrust-fault systems reveal diachronous Miocene exhumation of the Laji-Jishi Shan in northeastern Tibet. Whereas accelerated growth of the WNW-trending eastern Laj...

Indarctos spp. were the first large−bodied bears with omniv− orous tendencies. Two Indarctos fossils assigned to I. arcto− ides ssp. by Bernor, Feibel, et al. (2003) and Viranta and Werdelin (2003) show that the genus had a wide geographic range in Europe in theMiddleMiocene andwas represented by at least two contemporaneous species. Present work shows that the two species of Indarctos lived in...

The earliest record of plant visiting in bats dates to the Middle Miocene of La Venta, the world's most diverse tropical palaeocommunity. Palynephyllum antimaster is known from molars that indicate nectarivory. Skull length, an important indicator of key traits such as body size, bite force and trophic specialization, remains unknown. We developed Bayesian models to infer skull length based on ...

Northern South America and South East Asia are today's hotspots of crocodylian diversity with up to six (mainly alligatorid) and four (mainly crocodylid) living species respectively, of which usually no more than two or three occur sympatrically. In contrast, during the late Miocene, 14 species existed in South America. Here we show a diversity peak in sympatric occurrence of at least seven spe...