Fire is a key ecological process affecting vegetation dynamics and land cover. The characteristic frequency, size, and intensity of fire are driven by interactions between top-down climate-driven and bottom-up fuel-related processes. Disentangling climatic from non-climatic drivers of past fire regimes is a grand challenge in Earth systems science, and a topic where both paleoecology and ecolog...

Fossils of the Ediacara biota offer our earliest insight into diverse macroscopic life on this planet. In particular, given the diversity and range of exquisite soft-bodied preservation, the potential for unraveling aspects of the paleobiology and paleoecology is great. Clearly, however, there can be a taphonomic overprint that dictates how complete the assemblage is. New diversity data (includ...

Pollen analysis on a sediment core from a mangrove area in southeastern Mexico was discussed and aspects of paleoecology, ecology and conservation were considered. The core spans the last 4000 years and evidences changes in a Rhizophora mangle dominated system. Between 3900 and 3500 cal yr BP, pollen data indicate higher levels of precipitation. Between 3600 and 3300 cal yr BP tropical forest n...

5 Thalassinoides sp. 19 INTRODUCTION 6 Genus Trichichnus Frey, n. gen. 20 Purpose and scope 6 Trichichnus linearis Frey, n. sp. 20 Stratigraphy 6 Genus Zoophycos Massalongo, 1855 22 Correlation of Fort Hays exposures 9 Zoophycos sp. A 22 Petrology 9 Zoophycos sp. B 22 Paleontology 9 Miscellaneous burrows 23 Acknowledgments 10 Arthrophycus-like burrows 23 TRACE FOSSILS (ICHNOLOGY) 10 Scaphopod-s...

Four additional specimens from the Green River Formation of Wyoming are referred to the Eocene frigatebird Limnofregata azygosternon Olson, originally described from a nearly complete skeleton and two partial paratypes. Two skulls with mandibles and a partial postcranial skeleton are described as a new species, Limnofregata hasegawai, characterized by much larger size and a proportionately long...

Debate continues to rage between enthusiasts for climate change versus humans as a cause of the catastrophic faunal extinctions that have occurred in the wake of human arrival in previously uninhabited regions of the world. A global pattern of human arrival to such landmasses, followed by faunal collapse and other ecological changes, appears without known exception. This strongly suggests to so...

We discuss a simple methodology to enable a statistical comparison of human population with the vegetation of North America over the past 13000 years. Nonparametric kernel methods are applied for temporal and spatial smoothing of point data obtained from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database and the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, which results in sequences of maps showing the develop...

Microvertebrate fossils are used in biochronology to determinate the age of geological layers with a high grade of accuracy, and in paleoecology to extract information about the past enviroment. Actual techniques used to extract microfossils are manual, and require of a high amount of time and human resources. This fact make interesting the study of other more complex techniques. The work prese...

Testate amoebae (TA) are a group of free-living protozoa, important in ecology and paleoecology. Testate amoebae taxonomy is mainly based on the morphological features of the shell, as examined by means of light microscopy or (environmental) scanning electron microscopy (SEM/ESEM). We explored the potential applications of confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), two photon excitation microsc...