Pterosaur fossils are among the rarest and their eggs are even rarer. How then can we get an insight into the lifestyle of these flying reptiles? A wealth of new pterosaur fossils, including eggs, from China now provides exactly that.

The chronometric dating evidence for all hominid fossils from Africa and the Near East that have previously been dated to 500-50 ka is critically assessed using the concept of chronometric hygiene, and these dates are revised using Bayesian statistical analyses where possible. Sixteen relevant hominid sites lacking chronometric evidence are briefly discussed. Chronometric evidence from 37 sites...

a r t i c l e i n f o Numerous biological and chemical paleorecords have been used to infer paleoclimate, lake level fluctuation and faunal composition from the drill cores obtained from Lake Malawi, Africa. However, fish fossils have never been used to examine changes in African Great Lake vertebrate aquatic communities nor as indicators of changing paleolimnological conditions. Here we presen...

The sudden appearance of fossils that marks the so-called 'Cambrian explosion' has intrigued and exercised biologists since Darwin's time. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin made it clear that he believed that ancestral forms 'lived long before' their first fossil representatives. While he considered such an invisible record necessary to explain the level of complexity already seen in the foss...

We studied the presence of immunoglobulin G (IgG) in equid fossil bones from Venta Micena (Granada, Spain), dated at 1·6 Myr old, and from Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) (0·12 Myr), and in ostensibly hominid fossils VM1960 and VM3691 (1·6 Myr) from Venta Micena and CV1 and CV2 (1·4 Myr) from Cueva Victoria (Murcia, Spain). Samples taken from the specimens were crushed to a fine powder and their mine...

Plesiosaurs may be divided into two general morphotypes, based on body shape. ‘Pliosauromorphs’ have a large head and a short neck—traditionally thought to be pliosaurs, while ‘plesiosauromorphs’ have a small head and long neck, and have been seen as plesiosauroids. This is in fact an oversimplification, and today, detailed analysis and investigations of plesiosaur anatomy suggest that these mo...

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...

for study of systematic and palaeoecology of mid-cretaceous oysters, the basab section, with 380 m thickness, west of kuhbanan, northwest of kerman, was measured and sampled. the section comprises a high diverse fauna (macro and microfossils), such as echinoids, bivalves, oysters, brachiopods, gastropods, corals, ammonites, foraminifers and ostracods. the fossils indicate late aptian- early cen...

A major concern in molecular clock dating is how to use information from the fossil record to calibrate genetic distances from DNA sequences. Here we apply three Bayesian dating methods that differ in how calibration is achieved—‘node dating’ (ND) in BEAST, ‘total evidence’ (TE) dating in MrBayes, and the ‘fossilised birth-death’ (FBD) in FDPPDiv—to infer divergence times in the Osmundaceae or ...

Jurassic fossils of a bizarre fly larva that lived in water as a blood-sucking parasite highlight how much can be learnt from the study of the fossils of immature insects.