The Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO; ~40 Ma), which interrupted for ~500–600 kyr the long-term cooling trend culminating at Eocene/Oligocene boundary, still requires a comprehensive understanding of biotic resilience. Here we present high-resolution integrated foraminiferal and calcareous nannofossil study across MECO from expanded continuous Tethyan Baskil section (eastern Turkey) that of...

The Niobrara Formation of north-east Colorado, USA, has anomalously negative ?18O values compared to all other Cretaceous chalks. These unique have been attributed elevated heat flow and/or freshening the Western Interior Seaway. This work utilises clumped isotopes calcite (?47), peak burial temperatures estimated from pyrolysis data, and strontium neodymium carbonate re-evaluate origin calcite...

Forty two Paleocene benthic foraminiferal species of the Midway Formation in the Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas, USA were firstly investigated by Plummer (1927), and its paleogeographic distribution in some other countries in the Tethyan province were recorded: North America (USA, Mexico), South America (Argentina), Europe (North Sea Basin, Spain, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Bulgaria), North Af...

We discuss path planning in a direction-dependent environment illustrated by the fastestpath problem with anisotropic speed function. The difficulty of optimal-path finding in a direction-dependent medium comes from the fact that our travel-time function is asymmetric, and in general, violates the triangle inequality. We present an analytical form solution for the fastest-path finding problem i...

The Jurassic (∼201-145 Myr ago) was long considered a warm 'greenhouse' period; more recently cool, even 'icehouse' episodes have been postulated. However, the mechanisms governing transition between so-called Warm Modes and Cool Modes are poorly known. Here we present a new large high-quality oxygen-isotope dataset from an interval that includes previously suggested mode transitions. Our resul...

The globally warm climate of the early Pliocene gradually cooled from 4 million years ago, synchronous with decreasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In contrast, palaeoceanographic records indicate that the Nordic Seas cooled during the earliest Pliocene, before global cooling. However, a lack of knowledge regarding the precise timing of Nordic Seas cooling has limited our understanding of th...

We report the first record of a snake from the Cretaceous of northern South America. The remains come from the La Luna Formation (La Aguada Member, Cenomanian of Venezuela) and consist of several vertebrae, which belong to the precloacal region of the vertebral column. Comparisons to extant and extinct snakes show that the remains represent a new taxon, Lunaophis aquaticus gen. et sp nov. An aq...