Introduction There are three major oil sand areas in Canada, all in Alberta. There is also an oil sand deposit on Melville Island in the Arctic. The three major oil sand areas are from highest to lowest volume of reserves-in-place (AEUB 2003) Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River oil sand areas notwithstanding that bitumen reserves are also evident in subcropping carbonate rocks in Athabasca and...

Monotremes have left a poor fossil record, and paleontology has been virtually mute during two decades of discussion about molecular clock estimates of the timing of divergence between the platypus and echidna clades. We describe evidence from high-resolution x-ray computed tomography indicating that Teinolophos, an Early Cretaceous fossil from Australia's Flat Rocks locality (121-112.5 Ma), li...

In the two decades since the discovery of feathered dinosaurs [1-3], the range of plumage known from non-avialan theropods has expanded significantly, confirming several features predicted by developmentally informed models of feather evolution [4-10]. However, three-dimensional feather morphology and evolutionary patterns remain difficult to interpret, due to compression in sedimentary rocks [...

Turbiditic sandstones from the mid–Late Cretaceous Tianba Flysch sequence are well exposed near Tianba in the north Nieru Valley, southern Tibet, and contain significant amounts of chrome-rich spinels. Microprobe results show that the spinels have a well-developed Fe-Ti trend and have Cr/( ) 0.4–0.65, Mg/( ) 0.3–0.9, and TiO2 2 Cr Al Mg Fe 11%. The occurrence of melt inclusions, and well above ...

in the central iranianvolcanic belt (civb), north-west of shahre-babak, in the area of javazm, dehaj and khabr, about 60 subvolcanic porphyritic dacitic to rhyodacitic domes (1-10 km2) are intruded into a variety of rock sequences from mesozoic to early miocene in age. these rocks are a part of dehaj-sardoieh belt. the civb contains intrusive and extrusive rocks of cretaceous-quaternary age. ge...

hired is a large gold prospecting area which is located in south khorasan province, in the east of iran. gold mineralization is found in 4 target areas covering about 24 km2. the host rocks are mainly tertiary volcanics, some jurassic and cretaceous sediments. sub-volcanic rocks are of magnetite series (gabbros to diorite) and ilmenite series (granite-granodiorite-monzonite) which have intruded...

Sandstone petrography, zircon and apatite U-Pb geochronology, geochemistry of Early Cretaceous siliciclastic turbidites interbedded with basalt (Chivillas Formation) in the southern Sierra Madre Oriental, Mexico, indicate local provenance from westerly basement sources. Three main detrital populations were observed both geochronology: Meso–Neoproterozoic, Carboniferous–Permian, Cretaceous. Apat...

Zircon ages and geochemistry are presented for igneous rocks from SW Vietnam S Cambodia. Four main age groupings occur: Cretaceous (107–75 Ma), Early Jurassic (195 Late Triassic (230–222 Permian (294–265 Ma). samples amphibole-bearing biotite granodiorites to granites occur mainly east of the Kampot Fold Belt. Pre-Cretaceous within Belt dominantly felsic volcanics. The primarily high-K calc-alk...

The co-existence of Cretaceous adakitic and A-type granitoids in southern Tibet can offer fundamental constraints on subduction the Neo-Tethyan oceanic plate associated crustal growth processes, if their petrogenetic relationships are understood. Here, we report whole-rock geochemistry, zircon U-Pb geochronology, situ Hf isotopes trace elements from Chanang intrusive suite, including Zeyu Cuoji...

We present evidence for a thick ( 100 km) sequence of cogenetic rocks which make up the root of the Sierra Nevada batholith of California. The Sierran magmatism produced tonalitic and granodioritic magmas which reside in the Sierra Nevada upperto midcrust, as well as deep eclogite facies crust/upper mantle ma®c±ultrama®c cumulates. Samples of the ma®c±ultrama®c sequence are preserved as xenolit...