Marsupial mammal relatives (stem metatherians) from the Mesozoic Era (252-66 million years ago) are mostly known from isolated teeth and fragmentary jaws. Here we report on the first near-complete skull remains of a North American Late Cretaceous metatherian, the stagodontid Didelphodon vorax. Our phylogenetic analysis indicates that marsupials or their closest relatives evolved in North Americ...

Angiosperms evolved rapidly in the late Mesozoic. Data from the genetic-based approach called ’molecular clock’ permit an evaluation of the radiation of flowering plants through geological time and of the possible influences of Mesozoic mass extinctions. A total of 261 divergence ages of angiosperm families are considered. The radiation of flowering plants peaked in the Albian, early Campanian,...

The apatite fission track (FT) analysis of Jurassic sandstones from the Beipiao basin in the eastern China indicates a large variation in FT age peaks. The sandstone of the Beipiao Formation has two peak ages at 178.8 and 40.0 Ma, while the sandstone of the Tuchengzi Formation has three age peaks at 152.0, 77.5 and 32.5 Ma. This implies that the provenance of the Beipiao basin in the early Jura...

-The mid-Mesozoic time was characterized by massive reorganization of the ecological structure of benthic marine communities. Although the general pattern of this "Mesozoic Marine Revolution" has been extensively documented, little is known about how it affected the taxonomic and morphologic diversities of individual lineages of organisms. Here I document group-level dynamics of the Mesozoic ch...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Primary stage of the occurrence of river systems 3. Development of rivers in the Paleozoic 4. Change of hydrography in the Mesozoic 5. Modification of river systems in the Cenozoic 6. Water balance change of the river basins in the Mesozoic-Cenozoic 7. Features of dynamics of the hydrographic network and channel deformations 8. Hydrography and water resources of the ...

Within modern gymnosperms, conifers and Ginkgo are exclusively wind pollinated whereas many gnetaleans and cycads are insect pollinated. For cycads, thrips are specialized pollinators. We report such a specialized pollination mode from Early Cretaceous amber of Spain, wherein four female thrips representing a genus and two species in the family Melanthripidae were covered by abundant Cycadopite...