Numerous fossils were recovered during the excavations in the quarry in the Schambachtal near Schamhaupten, Bavaria, between 1989 and 1998 conducted by the Jura-Museum Eichst tt, Bavaria, Germany with support of the Friends of the Jura-Museum Eichst tt. The brothers Hans-Joachim (y) and Klaus-Dieter Weiss, who worked as volunteers in Schamhaupten, found an outstanding reptile that was recovered...

*Correspondence: Lionel Cavin, Département de Géologie et Paléontologie, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 1 rue Malagnou, CP6434, 1211 Genève 6, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] Since its usage by Darwin (1859), the concept of “living fossil” has undergone multiple definitions and has been much discussed and criticized. Soon after its discovery in 1938, the coelacanth Latimeria was rega...

—The potential of the ichnofossil record for exploring the evolution of behavior has never been fully realized. Some of this is due to the nature of the trace fossil record itself. Equally responsible is the separation of ichnology from the relevant areas of modern behavioral biology. The two disciplines have virtually no concepts, methods, or literature in common. The study of animal behavior ...

Polystrate fossils are one of numerous evidences for the rapid deposition of strata, as opposed to the uniformitarian belief in slow deposition over millions of years. They are briefly described from the Joggins Formation, Nova Scotia; Yellowstone National Park, Montana and Wyoming; Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, Washington; the Geodetic Hills of Axel Heiberg Island; the Lompoc diatomite, ...

Bees (Anthophila) are one of the major groups of angiosperm-pollinating insects and accordingly are widely studied in both basic and applied research, for which it is essential to have a clear understanding of their phylogeny, and evolutionary history. Direct evidence of bee evolutionary history has been hindered by a dearth of available fossils needed to determine the timing and tempo of their...

The Stirling Range Formation in southwestern Australia contains discoidal fossils previously linked to the late Neoproterozoic Ediacaran biota and possible trace fossils interpreted to have been made by vermiform, mucus-producing, motile organisms. The age of the sedimentary succession was recently reported to be between 2.0 and 1.2 billion years old, based on U–Pb geochronology of detrital zir...

With phylogenetic knowledge of Lepidoptera rapidly increasing, catalysed by increasingly powerful molecular techniques, the demand for fossil calibration points to estimate an evolutionary timeframe for the order is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. The family Nepticulidae is a species rich, basal branch within the phylogeny of the Lepidoptera, characterized by larval leaf-mining habits,...

Two taxa of cupulate magnoliid fossil flowers, Cronquistiflora and Detrusandra, are described from the Late Cretaceous (Turonian, ∼90 million years before present [MYBP]) Raritan (or lower Magothy) Formation of New Jersey. The fossil taxa are represented by flowers at various stages of development, associated fragments of cup-shaped floral receptacles with attached anthers, and isolated anthers...

This study documents and examines selected implications of the adolescent supraorbital anatomy of the Le Moustier 1 Neandertal. Le Moustier's supraorbital morphology conforms to that expected of an adolescent Neandertal but indicates that significant development of the adult Neandertal torus occurs late in ontogeny. As the best preserved adolescent from the Late Pleistocene, Le Moustier 1's ana...

Remnants of AGN jets and their surrounding cocoons leave colossal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) fossil structures storing total energies ∼10 erg. The original active galacic nucleus (AGN) may be dead but the fossil will retain its stable configuration resembling the reversed-field pinch (RFP) encountered in laboratory MHD experiments. In an RFP the longitudinal magnetic field changes direction at a...