Remote 3D virtual reality systems for visualizing fossils and ores are a kind of efficient tools to facilitate communication and research in geology and palaeontology community. During the visualization procedure, we must keep not only the geometrical data but also the surface textures and color information. They are very important for the specialists to analyse the forming time and environment...

The genus Stylidium (type species Turritella eschrichtii Middendorff, 1849, by original designation) was established by Dall (in Bartsch, 1907: 178) for a distinctive group of the gastropods in the Bittiinae (Cerithiidae) and remains in current active use (Houbrick, 1993; Bouchet & Rosenberg, 2013). However, the generic name Stylidium Eichwald (1855: 3) was established for a fossil coral prior ...

1 National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, 2 ITZ Ecology & Evolution, TiHo Hannover, Hannover, Germany, 3 Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 4 ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, Australia, 5 Bioinformatics Group, Department of Computer Science, and Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinforma...

Often, biogeography is applied only as a narrative addition to phylogenetic studies and lacks scientific rigour. However, if research questions are framed as hypotheses, biogeographical scenarios become testable. In this review, we explain some problems with narrative biogeography and show how the use of explicit hypotheses is changing understanding of how organisms came to be distributed as th...

Identification of the ontogenetic status of an extinct organism is complex, and yet this underpins major areas of research, from taxonomy and systematics to ecology and evolution. In the case of the non-avialan dinosaurs, at least some were reproductively mature before they were skeletally mature, and a lack of consensus on how to define an 'adult' animal causes problems for even basic scientif...

The full publication of Ardipithecus ramidus has particular importance for the origins of hominin bipedality, and strengthens the growing case for an arboreal origin. Palaeontological techniques however inevitably concentrate on details of fragmentary postcranial bones and can benefit from a whole-animal perspective. This can be provided by field studies of locomotor behaviour, which provide a ...