Recent exploration of Miocene-age deposits at Nosy Makamby, a small island ~50 km southwest of Mahajanga city in northwestern Madagascar, has led to the recovery of a large sample [82] of isolated barracuda teeth (Sphyraena sp.). in a tropical marine fauna that also includes diverse marine invertebrates, chondrichthyans, bony fishes, turtles, crocodylians, and sirenians. Characteristically for ...

Ctenodactylinae (gundis) is a clade of rodents that experienced, in Miocene time, their greatest diversification and widest distribution. They expanded from the Far East, their area of origin, to Africa, which they entered from what would become the Arabian Peninsula. Questions concerning the origin of African Ctenodactylinae persist essentially because of a poor fossil record from the Miocene ...

A new species of the bovid Shaanxispira, from the upper Miocene deposits of the Linxia Basin, Gansu Province, China, is described here. Shaanxispira is endemic to Northern China and was previously known only from the Lantian area, Shaanxi Province, by two species, S. chowi and S. baheensis. The new species, S. linxiaensis nov. sp., is of early Bahean in age, slightly older than the species from...

Mantis shrimps (Crustacea: Stomatopoda) are rather rare in the fossil record. Nineteen species have been assigned to Squillidae, of which 12 species have been recorded from the Miocene. We describe herein a squillid, Squilla taulinanus n. sp., from the Miocene of Taulignan, south-eastern France. The exceptionally well-preserved specimen is remarkable in apparently having abdominal somites 5–6 c...

Background: We developed a method to estimate precipitation using mammalian ecomorphology, specifically the relative height of the molars of herbivores (see companion paper, this issue). Question: If we apply the new method to paleoenvironments, do the results agree with previous results from fossil mammals and paleobotanical proxies? Data: Large herbivorous fossil mammals of Eurasia. Data from...

Fieldwork in the Yuanmou Basin of southern China has uncovered a large assemblage of late Miocene hominoid fossils assigned to Lufengpithecus hudienensis. Two mandibular first molars from this species were made available for histological analysis as part of a larger ongoing study on the ontogeny of dental development in Miocene to Recent hominoids. Results are compared with published and unpubl...

Specialized predators on polychaetes, fishes, hemichordates or other molluscs, members of the predominantly tropical gastropod genus Conus diversified rapidly during the Miocene to constitute the most species-rich modern marine genus. We used DNA sequence data from mitochondrial and nuclear loci of 76 Conus species to generate species-level phylogenetic hypotheses for this genus and then mapped...

Nakali is an early Late Miocene fossil locality in north-central Kenya, where the Kenya– Japan Joint Expedition team has carried out fieldwork since 2002. Previously, a large hominoid Nakalipithecus nakayamai was reported from site NA39 of this locality. In addition to Nakalipithecus, the hominoid material collected from Nakali includes an isolated P3, which shows a considerably different morph...

Paleosols are an important tool in the paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental interpretation of continental deposits and can provide a high-resolution proxy for paleoclimate. Results from geochemical climofunctions applied to Early Miocene strata exposed in the Ebro Basin, Spain, demonstrate that mean annual precipitation was the dominant control on paleosol type and indicate that the paleoclimat...

The styles of soft-sediment deformation, mineralogy, and biostratigraphy of mass-transport deposits recovered from Leg 150 drill sites (902-906) provide important new information on the erosional and sedimentary history of the New Jersey continental slope and rise, and on the relationship of mass-wasting processes to changes in relative sea level. Nine distinct sedimentary facies are recognized...