There are several rather distinct traditions in the contemporary study of human evolution. One is the detailed study of anatomical differences among fossils. A second emphasizes classical ecology with detailed attention to ancient climates and environments and comparative biogeography. A third has a focus on behavioral ecology (i.e., what used to be called sociobiology). It appears to this outs...

Zion National Park and related areas of southern Utah contain exposures of the largest ancient wind-blown (eolian) dune system known in North America, preserved in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone. Despite the common lack of absolute age constraints, ancient desert sand seas (ergs) and their erg margins can record valuable paleoclimatic proxies in the sedimentary record. The central erg portion of...

Mixotrophy among planktonic eukaryotic organisms is broadly defined as the combined use of photosynthetic and heterotrophic nutrition within a single organism. The conventional view of species as either phototrophic (capable of producing energy and carbon for growth using only inorganic compounds and light) or heterotrophic (wholly dependent on preformed organic material for nutrition) is a pre...

A US National Science Foundation-funded workshop occurred 17–19 May 2013 at the University of Oklahoma to stimulate research using continental scientific drilling to explore earth’s sedimentary, paleobiological and biogeochemical record. Participants submitted 3-page “pre-proposals” to highlight projects that envisioned using drill-core studies to address scientific issues in paleobiology, pale...

Detailed sedimentological study of Devonian black shales from the eastern USA shows that these rocks contain valuable textural clues to their depositional history, clues that hitherto have gone mostly unrecognized. Cryptic bioturbation and subtle erosional features suggest the presence, originally, of much more benthic life and bottom current activity than is commonly assumed for these deposits...

A continuous record of Pliocene-Pleistocene East African volcanic tephra deposition has been developed from a marine sediment sequence at Ocean Drilling Program Sites 721/722 in the Arabian Sea, some 2000 km distant from Ethiopian source volcanoes. The marine depositional sequence is continuous over the Pliocene-Pleistocene interval, has a wealth of published data addressing regional paleoclima...