Este Volumen Extraordinario de la Revista Española Paleontología recopila las conferencias invitadas y algunas comunicaciones que se presentaron en el curso VII Jornadas Paleontología, celebradas Oviedo entre los días 24 26 octubre 1991, bajo lema «Paleontología del Paleozoico».
 En cierto modo, volumen nos ocupa forma parte una serie volúmenes extraordinarios publicados con motivo celebra...

"Pea brain", "muscle head" familiar words to our vernacular which describe mentality, and point to our belief that brain size and intelligence go hand in hand. Since man is at the top of the mental hierarchy of animal intelligence, evolutionists claim fossil support for man's ancestry from a small pongid-size brain. Stephan Molnar (1975, p.56) says, "That the brain space and hence the brain has...

THIRTY years ago zoologists were mainly occupied with that comparative description of development which had aroused intense interest owing to the overwhelming stimulus of the theory of evolution. The analogy of the developing egg and the developing species from a single undifferentiated cell to a differentiated mass of cells was regarded as an even stronger support to that theory than the direc...

Aims Several bird-pollinated or ornithophilous flowers are present on the Macaronesian archipelagos, the Canary Islands and Madeira, but absent from nearby NW Africa and Europe. In Macaronesia, no specialist nectar-feeding birds are found, but several generalist passerine bird species visit flowers for nectar. Two hypotheses attempt to explain the origin and evolution of ornithophily in the Mac...

Psychodid sand flies are blood-sucking fly vectors of several parasitic diseases. The oldest definitive record of this group is from the Lower Cretaceous amber of Lebanon (circa-135 to -125 My), but the high diversity within this group supports the idea that the psychodoids originated much earlier in history. The palaeontology demonstrates that the Lower Creataceous representatives of the diffe...

A series of experiments was made to determine the capacity of an archaeal strain, Methanocaldococcus jannaschii to bind metals and to study the effects of metal-binding on the subsequent silicification of the microorganisms. The results showed that M. jannaschii can rapidly bind several metal cations (Fe 3+ , Ca 2+ , Pb 2+ , Zn 2+ , Cu 2+ ). Considering the lack of silicification of this strain...