A new fossil mushroom is described and illustrated from the Lower Cretaceous Crato Formation of northeast Brazil. Gondwanagaricites magnificus gen. et sp. nov. is remarkable for its exceptional preservation as a mineralized replacement in laminated limestone, as all other fossil mushrooms are known from amber inclusions. Gondwanagaricites represents the oldest fossil mushroom to date and the fi...

A recent molecular clock analysis concluded that Gondwanan vicariance and out-of-India dispersal best explained the distribution of Crypteroniaceae and its allies (Conti et al. 2002). A reanalysis of their data using a different molecular dating technique and calibration point is congruent with an alternative hypothesis, namely dispersal between India, Africa, and South America long after the i...

Abstract Constraining the positions of, and interrelationships between, Earth's major continental blocks has played a role in validating concept of supercontinent cycle. Minor fragments can provide additional key constraints on modes assembly dispersal. The Tarim craton been placed both at core Rodinia or its periphery, differentiating between two scenarios widespread implications for breakup s...

The latest Neoproterozoic through Cambrian is one of the most remarkable intervals in geologic time. Tectonically, the period from 580 to 490 Ma marks a time of rapid plate reorganization following the final stages of supercontinental breakup and Gondwana assembly. The apparent speed at which this reorganization occurred led some to propose a link between tectonic events, biologic changes and c...

The East African Orogen (EAO) is one of Earth’s great collision zones, where East and West Gondwana collided to form the supercontinent ‘Greater Gondwana’ or ‘Pannotia’ at the end of Neoproterozoic time. There is now sufficient Nd isotopic data for basement rocks of the EAO to yield a useful summary. A total of 449 samples were gleaned from the literature, recalculated to a common value for the...

A single leafy stem from the Middle or lowermost Upper Devonian Campo Chico Formation, Sierra de Perija, western Venezuela, is the first record of the important Devonian herbaceous lycophyte Leclercqia from South America, usually considered as part of western Gondwana. The seemingly cosmopolitan distribution of this genus is discussed in relation to coeval assemblages and palaeocontinental reco...

The Southern Hemisphere has traditionally been considered as having a fundamentally vicariant history. The common trans-Pacific disjunctions are usually explained by the sequential breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana during the last 165 million years, causing successive division of an ancestral biota. However, recent biogeographic studies, based on molecular estimates and more accurate paleo...

The provenance of the upper Cambrian to Upper Ordovician sedimentary rocks Tasmania and Waratah Bay in southern Victoria provides information about complex dynamic tectonic environment present during their deposition. This paper uses U–Pb detrital zircon data constrain stratigraphic comparisons reconstructions these rock sequences. Multivariate statistics are used investigate similarity between...

to assess biogeographic affinity of the late cambrian (furongian) and the early ordovician (late tremadocian) faunas of eastern alborz, a multivariate cluster analysis using the pair-group raup-crick similarity index has been applied. the late cambrian fauna of alborz shows clear gondwanan signatures with the closest affinities to the contemporaneous faunas of temperate latitude peri-gondwana (...