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...

The change in ancient atmospheric CO2 concentrations provides important clues for understanding the relationship between the atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature. However, the lack of CO2 evolution curves estimated from a single terrestrial proxy prevents the understanding of climatic and environmental impacts due to variations in data. Thus, based on the stomatal index of fossi...

Bandicoots (Peramelemorphia) are a major order of australidelphian marsupials, which despite a fossil record spanning at least the past 25 million years and a pandemic Australasian range, remain poorly understood in terms of their evolutionary relationships. Many living peramelemorphians are critically endangered, making this group an important focus for biological and conservation research. To...

Precipitation over India is driven by the Indian monsoon. Although changes in this atmospheric circulation are caused by the differential seasonal diabatic heating of Asia and the Indo-Pacific Ocean, it is so far unknown how global warming influences the monsoon rainfalls regionally. Herein, we present a Miocene pollen flora as the first direct proxy for monsoon over southern India during the M...

We sequenced 2167 base pairs (bp) of mitochondrial DNA cytochrome b and 16S, and 1390 bp of nuclear genes BRCA1 and ApoB in shrews taxa (Eulipotyphla, family Soricidae). The aim was to study the relationships at higher taxonomic levels within this family, and in particular the position of difficult clades such as Anourosorex and Myosorex. The data confirmed two monophyletic subfamilies, Soricin...

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...

Foraminiferal oxygen isotopes from deep-sea sediment cores suggest that a rapid expansion of the Antarctic ice sheet took place in the Middle Miocene around 13.9 million years ago. The origin for this transition is still not understood satisfactorily. One possible cause is a drop in the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) in combination with orbital forcing. A complication is ...

The fossil ape Lufengpithecus is known from a number of late Miocene sites in Yunnan Province in southern China. Along with other fossil apes from South and Southeast Asia, it is widely considered to be a relative of the extant orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus. It is best represented at the type site of Shihuiba (Lufeng) by several partial to nearly complete but badly crushed adult crania. There is, h...

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...