Stable carbon isotopic analyses of organic carbon (d13C) in individual paleosol profiles from Permian–Triassic sequences of Antarctica reveal systematic isotopic variations with profile depth. These variations are in many cases analogous to those in modern soils, which are functions of redox conditions, soil development, and degree and type of microbial decay. In modern soils, these isotopic de...

Triassic tetrapods are of key importance in understanding their evolutionary history, because several tetrapod clades, including most of their modern lineages, first appeared or experienced their initial evolutionary radiation during this Period. In order to test previous palaeobiogeographical hypotheses of Triassic tetrapod faunas, tree reconciliation analyses (TRA) were performed with the aim...

Outcrops of the Lower Triassic (Spathian) Virgin Limestone Member (Moenkopi Formation) in the southwestern United States contain the oldest known metazoan bioherms formed in the aftermath of the endPermian mass extinction. These small buildups, up to 1.0 m in diameter and 0.2 m high, were constructed by cementing bivalves. The bivalve bioherms accreted in a shallow, subtidal environment above s...

—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...

During the end-Permian mass extinction, marine ecosystems suffered a major drop in diversity, which was maintained throughout the Early Triassic until delayed recovery during the Middle Triassic. This depressed diversity in the Early Triassic correlates with multiple major perturbations to the global carbon cycle, interpreted as either intrinsic ecosystem or external palaeoenvironmental effects...

The Permo-Triassic archosauromorph record is crucial to understand the impact of the Permo-Triassic mass extinction on the early evolution of the group and its subsequent dominance in Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems. However, the Permo-Triassic archosauromorph record is still very poor in most continents and hampers the identification of global macroevolutionary patterns. Here we describe crani...

Similarities in body plan evolution, such as wings in pterosaurs, birds, and bats or limblessness in snakes and amphisbaenians, can be recognized as classical examples of convergence among animals [1-3]. We introduce a new Triassic stem archosaur that is unexpectedly and remarkably convergent with the "dome-headed" pachycephalosaur dinosaurs that lived over 100 million years later. Surprisingly...

The evolutionary radiation of dinosaurs in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic was a pivotal event in the Earth's history but is poorly understood, as previous studies have focused on vague driving mechanisms and have not untangled different macroevolutionary components (origination, diversity, abundance and disparity). We calculate the morphological disparity (morphospace occupation) of dinos...

Ichthyosaurs were important marine predators in the Early Jurassic, and an abundant and diverse component of Mesozoic marine ecosystems. Despite their ecological importance, however, the Early Jurassic species represent a reduced remnant of their former significance in the Triassic. Ichthyosaurs passed through an evolutionary bottleneck at, or close to, the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, which red...

The facies changes, tectonics and magmatism across the Triassic–Jurassic boundary in the southern Tethyan margin have been studied in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia and Jordan an unconformable contact is recognized between the Upper Triassic and Lower Jurassic rocks. This unconformity surface is marked by the truncation of the fluvial clastics of the uppermost Triassic b...