Vertebrate fossils from Texas caves have been studied for over 75 years. In that time few summary treatments of Texas caves and their fossil faunas have been published. The only reviews focusing specifically on Texas cave vertebrate paleontology sites were written over 20 years ago (Frank, 1964; Lundelius and Slaughter, 1971). Much work on cave sites in Texas has occurred since these reviews. S...

This article reviews the fundamental principles of the finite element method and the three basic steps (model creation, solution, and validation and interpretation) involved in using it to examine structural mechanics. Validation is a critical step in the analysis, without which researchers cannot evaluate the extent to which the model represents or is relevant to the real biological condition....

Many of the historic turning points in the history of evolutionary science are examples of ‘synthetic research’, in which new knowledge was generated through the integration of existing data, methods, results and concepts. This tradition goes back to Darwin’s famously multifaceted case for evolution by natural selection in The Origin of Species, the reconciliation of Mendelian and statistical g...

Just over sixty years ago, the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists was founded to resolve ‘the apparent points of conflict between scientific theory and Orthodox Judaism’ [1]. The claims of paleontology, cosmology, and especially evolutionary biology exposed contradictions with traditional beliefs that were hard to overcome – so hard, indeed, that Alvin Radkowsky (an eminent nuclear physi...

JASON J. HEAD , PATRICIA A. HOLROYD, J. HOWARD HUTCHISON, and RUSSELL L. CIOCHON, Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, DC 20012–7012, USA, [email protected]; School of Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS, United Kingdom; Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkele...

The Middle to Upper Paleolithic boundary marks an important threshold in human cultural and biological evolutionwith the establishment of Anatomically Modern Humans and the termination of Neandertal settlement in Eurasia between 40–30 ka C BP. The demographic and cultural processes underlying this ‘‘transition’’ throughout Eurasia are among the most intensively debated issues in Paleolithic Arc...

Science is the most fun when it makes things simple. And it is at the best when we find a theory that makes many previously-unrelated observations fit together like a puzzle, and which then leads to new predictions and discoveries. During the midto late 1960s, Plate-Tectonics did this in grand style for most of the Earth sciences, allowing an entire host of observations from paleontology to pet...

Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Unidad Asociada al Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas (CSIC). Universitat Rovira I Virgili (URV), Campus Catalunya, Avinguda de Catalunya, 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain (Carbonell, Cáceres, Lozano, Saladié, Rosell, Lorenzo, Vallverdú, Huguet, Canals) (icaceresprehistoria.urv.cat)/Visiting professor, Institute of Verteb...