The structural configuration of SW Japan mainly reflects a late Jurassic-early Cretaceous orogeny. The region is divided into an inner belt and an outer belt, on the Japan sea and Pacific ocean sides respectively, by a strike-slip fault, the Median Tectonic Line (MTL). Both consist of a series of stacked nappes. The inner belt is divided into a Jurassic olistostrome known as the Tanba zone and ...

The end-Permian biotic crisis (~252.5 Ma) represents the most severe extinction event in Earth's history. This paper investigates diversity patterns in Anomodontia, an extinct group of therapsid synapsids ('mammal-like reptiles'), through time and in particular across this event. As herbivores and the dominant terrestrial tetrapods of their time, anomodonts play a central role in assessing the ...

Traditional wisdom holds that biotic recovery from the end-Permian extinction was slow and gradual, and was not complete until the Middle Triassic. Here, we report that the evolution of marine predator feeding guilds, and their trophic structure, proceeded faster. Marine reptile lineages with unique feeding adaptations emerged during the Early Triassic (about 248 million years ago), including t...

BACKGROUND Several clades of bivalve molluscs have invaded freshwaters at various times throughout Phanerozoic history. The most successful freshwater clade in the modern world is the Unionoida. Unionoids arose in the Triassic Period, sometime after the major extinction event at the End-Permian boundary and are now widely distributed across all continents except Antarctica. Until now, no freshw...

—Delayed biotic recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction has long been interpreted to result from environmental inhibition. Recently, evidence of more rapid recovery has begun to emerge, suggesting the role of environmental inhibition was previously overestimated. However, there have been few high-resolution taxonomic and ecological studies spanning the full Early and Middle Triassic recov...

—Mesozoic marine ecosystems were dominated by several clades of reptiles, including sauropterygians, ichthyosaurs, crocodylomorphs, turtles, and mosasaurs, that repeatedly invaded ocean ecosystems. Previous research has shown that marine reptiles achieved great taxonomic diversity in the Middle Triassic, as they broadly diversified into many feeding modes in the aftermath of the Permo-Triassic ...

Abstract Temnospondyl amphibians are common in non-marine Triassic assemblages, including the Fremouw Formation (Lower to Middle Triassic) of Antarctica. Temnospondyls were among first tetrapods be collected from Antarctica, but their record lower has long been tenuous. One taxon, ‘ Austrobrachyops jenseni ,’ is represented by a type specimen comprising only partial pterygoid, which now thought...

rocks of the Stuhuni and King Salmon Groups; a pre-.Middlm: Triassic unconformity is found througbmt the North American Cordillera (Read and Okulitch, 1977, Siberling, 1973:. In the Stikine Terrane, late Triassic volcanic rocks ar: dominantly fragmental andcommonly alkalic. Based on bul:: rock chemistry, both extensional, ba:k-arc, and Fore-ar: tectonic settings have been suggested tor these r...