Plate reconstructions of the New Zealand region indicate substantial Cenozoic tectonic rotation of the Hikurangi margin. This study was undertaken to determine the rotational history of the northern Marlborough paleomagnetic domain in the southern part of the Hikurangi margin. Most Cenozoic rocks in the Marlborough region are unstably magnetised, and useful results were obtained only from late ...

The bat genus Myotis is represented by 120+ living species and 40+ extinct species and is found on every continent except Antarctica. The time of divergence of Myotis has been contentious as has the time and place of origin of its encompassing group the Vespertilionidae, the most diverse (450+ species) and widely distributed extant bat family. Fossil Myotis species are common, especially in Eur...

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 Ricardo Group is a 1,700-m-thick sequence of Miocene volcanic rocks and continental sedimentary rocks deposited between ~19 and 7 Ma in the El Paso basin, near the junction of the Garlock fault and the Sierra Nevada frontal fault in southern California. The combination of stratigraphic and structural data from the Ricardo Group with chronologic and rotational histories derived from magnetos...

Spider crabs (Majoidea) are well-known from modern oceans and are also common in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean. When spider crabs appeared in the Western Atlantic in deep time, and when they became diverse, hinges on their fossil record. By reviewing their fossil record, we show that (1) spider crabs first appeared in the Western Atlantic in the Late Cretaceous, (2) they became common ...

The Miocene Randeck Maar (southwestern Germany) is one of the only sites with abundant material of fossil honey bees. The fauna has been the focus of much scrutiny by early authors who recognized multiple species or subspecies within the fauna. The history of work on the Randeck Maar is briefly reviewed and these fossils placed into context with other Tertiary and living species of the genus Ap...

In a previous study, we estimated the cranial disparity of turtles (Testudinata) through time using geometric morphometric data from both terminal taxa and hypothetical ancestors to compensate for temporal gaps in the fossil record. While this method yielded reasonable results for the Mesozoic and the early Cenozoic, we found a large drop in cranial disparity for the Miocene, for which we found...

Whale-fall communities support a deep-sea invertebrate assemblage that subsists entirely on the decaying carcasses of large cetaceans. The oldest whale-falls are Late Eocene in age, but these early whale-falls differ in faunal content and host cetacean size from Neogene and Recent whale-falls. Vesicomyid bivalves, for example, are major components of the sulphophilic stage in Miocene and Recent...

Understanding the diversification of polyploid crops in the circum-Mediterranean region is a challenging issue in evolutionary biology. Sequence data of three nuclear genes and three plastid DNA fragments from 109 accessions of Avena L. (Poaceae) and the outgroups were used for maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses. The evolution of cultivated oat (Avena sativa L.) and its close relatives wa...

During the latest Miocene and the early Pliocene, tetraconodontine suids were the most predominant large omnivorous mammals in Africa. Yet, new species were often identified on the grounds of limited evidence, a situation impacting their value for biochronological correlations as well as for environmental and biogeographical reconstructions. The description of the most abundant known collection...