The subtribe Eritrichiinae belongs to tribe Rochelieae (Borginaceae; Cynoglossoideae) which is composed of about 200 species in five genera including Eritrichium, Lappula, Hackelia, Lepechiniella, and Rochelia. The majority of the species are annual and grow in xeric habitats. The genus Lappula as an arid adapted and the second biggest genus...

We describe here a new species of the bovid Criotherium, from the late Miocene of Bulgaria. The genus was previously known to definitely occur only in Samos (Greece) and Kemiklitepe (Western Turkey), with the single species C. argalioides. The new species, C. nikolovi, is more primitive than the latter, although both are probably contemporaneous, suggesting the occurrence of two lineages in the...

Jaws and dentition closely resembling those of the extant tuatara (Sphenodon) are described from the Manuherikia Group (Early Miocene; 19-16 million years ago, Mya) of Central Otago, New Zealand. This material is significant in bridging a gap of nearly 70 million years in the rhynchocephalian fossil record between the Late Pleistocene of New Zealand and the Late Cretaceous of Argentina. It prov...

The ages of fluvial deposits at the head of Chesapeake Bay, thought to be the updip, chronostratigraphic equivalents of a well-dated late Oligocene to Quatemary marine sequence in the Salisbury Embayment, are poorly known. We present data regarding a new occurrence of a palynoflora recovered from the Bryn Mawr Formation in Cecil County, Maryland. The floral assemblage for the Bryn Mawr Formatio...

Modern flammable ecosystems include tropical and subtropical savannas, steppe grasslands, boreal forests, and temperate sclerophyll shrublands. Despite the apparent fiery nature of much contemporary vegetation, terrestrial fossil evidence would suggest we live in a time of low fire activity relative to the deep past. The inertinite content of coal, fossil charcoal, is strikingly low from the Eo...

—The subfamily Equinae in the Great Plains region of North America underwent a dramatic radiation and subsequent decline as climate changed from warm and humid in the middle Miocene to cooler and more arid conditions during the late Miocene. Here we use ecological niche modeling (ENM), specifically the GARP (Genetic Algorithm using Rule-set Prediction) modeling system, to reconstruct the geogra...

We report new examples of Cenozoic cold-seep communities from Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, and Venezuela, and attempt to improve the stratigraphic dating of Cenozoic Caribbean seep communities using strontium isotope stratigraphy. Two seep faunas are distinguished in Barbados: the late Eocene mudstone-hosted 'Joes River fauna' consists mainly of large lucinid bivalves and t...

High quality 3D seismic data are used to assess the significance of mass-transport deposits (MTDs) to the evolution of the Pearl River Mouth Basin (South China Sea). Basal shear surfaces and lateral margins of seven recurrent MTDs are mapped to reveal a general NE-SW transport direction throughout the Late Miocene-Quaternary. A key result of our analysis is the perceived relationship between th...

This study documents diversity decline in a once-speciose rodent clade, the family Aplodontidae, and evaluates the potential influence of three commonly suggested controls on diversity: climate change, floral change, and competitive interactions. Aplodontids first appeared in the late Eocene, diversified during the early Oligocene, declined precipitously at the end of the Oligocene such that st...

The timing history and driving mechanisms of C4 expansion and Tibetan uplift are hotly debated issues. Paleoenvironmental evidence from within the Tibetan Plateau is essential to help resolve these issues. Here we report results of stable C and O isotope analyses of tooth enamel samples from a variety of late Cenozoic mammals, including deer, giraffe, horse, rhino, and elephant, from the Qaidam...