Dental microwear of Late Miocene artiodactyls from Afghanistan can yield information on paleodiet and thus inferences can be drawn about their paleoenvironment. The ‘‘Molayan’’ locality lies at the border between the Greek–Iranian and Siwalik bioprovinces. Knowledge of the paleoenvironment will further our understanding of the faunal exchanges between these two provinces during the Late Miocene...

Mylagaulid fossorial rodents are a common component of North American Miocene fossil faunas. However outside of North America, only three species are known from Asia. Here we report two new mylagaulids, Irtyshogaulus minor gen. et sp. nov. and Irtyshogaulus major gen. et sp. nov., recovered from early Miocene sediments in the Junggar Basin in northwestern China. The two new taxa are small-sized...

We examine the timing of deformation and exhumation of the Nanga Parbat-Haramosh massif in the western syntaxis of the Himalaya. This study presents geochronologic and thermochronologic data obtained from basement, shear zone, and intrusive units within the massif to reveal the Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the massif and to document the extent of the Plio-Pleistocene tectonic activity. These ...

Hominoids, or taxa identified as hominoids, are known from much of Africa, Asia, and Europe since the Late Oligocene. The earliest taxa, fromAfrica, resemble extant hominoids but share with them mainly primitive characters. Middle and Late Miocene taxa are clearly hominoids, and by the end of the Middle Miocene most can be attributed to either the pongine (Pongo) or hominine (African ape and hu...

The middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (17–15 Ma; MCO) is a period of global warmth and relatively high CO2 and is thought to be associated with a significant retreat of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS). We present here a new planktic foraminiferal dB record from 16.6 to 11.8 Ma from two deep ocean sites currently in equilibrium with the atmosphere with respect to CO2. These new data demonstrate that...

We reconstructed the phylogeny of the subfamily Viverrinae (Mammalia, Carnivora, Viverridae) using a approximately 3kb data set in order to reassess timing and patterns of faunal exchanges between Asia and Africa. Maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian analyses of separated and combined matrices (cytochrome b, transthyretin intron I and IRBP exon 1 [IRBP1]) recovered all the well-s...

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...

Although species within Lagomorpha are derived from a common ancestor, the distribution range and body size of its two extant groups, ochotonids and leporids, are quite differentiated. It is unclear what has driven their disparate evolutionary history. In this study, we compile and update all fossil records of Lagomorpha for the first time, to trace the evolutionary processes and infer their ev...

A shortage of Cenozoic vertebrate fossils in the Tibetan Plateau has been an obstacle in our understanding of biological evolution in response to changes in tectonism, topography, and environment. This is especially true for Paleogene records, so far known by only two sites along the northern rim of the Plateau. We report a Hongyazi Basin in northern Tibetan Plateau that produces at least three...

The late Miocene was an important time to understand the geological, climatic, and biotic evolution of the ancient New World tropics and the context for the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). Despite this importance, upper Miocene deposits containing diverse faunas and floras and their associated geological context are rare in Central America. We present an integrated study of the geolog...