Climatic change, and in particular aridification, has played a dominant role in shaping Southern Hemisphere biotas since the mid-Neogene. In Australia, ancient and geologically stable ranges within the vast arid zone have functioned as refugia for populations of mesic taxa extirpated from surrounding areas, yet the extent to which relicts may be linked to major aridification events before or af...

The D’Entrecasteaux Islands of south-eastern Papua New Guinea are active metamorphic core complexes that formed within a region where the plate tectonic regime has transitioned from subduction to rifting. While rapid, post 4 Myr exhumation and cooling of amphibolite and greenschist facies rocks that constitute the footwall of the crustal scale detachment fault system have been previously docume...

Fossils of the giant panda Ailuropoda (Order Carnivora, Family Ursidae) are largely isolated teeth, mandibles, and a few rare skulls, known from the late Pliocene to late Pleistocene in China and Southeast Asia. Much of this material represents a Pleistocene chronospecies, Ailuropoda baconi, an animal larger than the living giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca. The earliest certain record of Ail...

Environmental theories of African faunal evolution state that important evolutionary changes during the Pliocene^ Pleistocene interval (the last ca. 5.3 million years) were mediated by changes in African climate or shifts in climate variability. Marine sediment sequences demonstrate that subtropical African climate periodically oscillated between markedly wetter and drier conditions, paced by e...

Lower Pliocene temperate carbonates exhibit landward-downlapping beds at the southern margin of the Carboneras Basin in south-eastern Spain. This rarely documented stratal geometry resulted from the accumulation of bedded bioclastic carbonate sand and gravel by longshore currents along a spit platform located a few hundred metres from the palaeoshoreline. The top of the spit platform was covere...

Major ice loss in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is hypothesized to have triggered sheet collapses during past warm periods such as those Pliocene. International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 379 recovered continuous late Miocene Holocene sediments from a sediment drift on continental rise, allowing assessment sedimentation processes response climate cycl...

New fossil hominid specimens from the Laetolili fossil locality in Tanzania are described. The material includes mandibles and teeth derived from reliably-dated deposits of Pliocene age. Preliminary descriptions, measurements and illustrations are presented.