Localities within strata of the Witpoort Formation (Witteberg Group, Cape Supergroup) South Africa provide diverse new fossil material Famennian plants from a high palaeolatitude marginal marine setting. Lycopsid axes with sterile leaves include here diagnosed to two species Colpodexylon Banks 1944. C. pullumpedes sp. nov. Waterloo Farm is ‘short-tipped’ species, whereas mergae Coombs Hill, ‘lo...

The new genus and species, Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis, are described in Scorpiones incertae se dis on the basis of fragments from the Famennian (Late Devonian) Waterloo Farm locality near Grahams town, Eastern Cape, South Africa. This finding adds to the sparse record of Late Devonian scorpion taxa and provides the first evidence of Palaeozoic scorpions from Gondwana. Material includes a com...

members of the family laccophyllidae are small, solitary rugose corals with stratigraphic ranges from silurian to permian. among the laccophyllids, axial ends of major septa are united in an aulos and dissepiments may be absent or present. minor septa can be contratingent and sometimes are small or in some genera are absent. septa and aulos may be thick or thin. in this study, famennian rugose ...

Pelagic standard conodont biozonation is less applicable to nearshore shallow-water depositional settings close the peritidal, where it needed establish its own zonation. The Upper Devonian Xiejingsi Formation in South China an important unit for biostratigraphy investigation as deposits argillaceous-carbonate mixed facies which yield numerous marine fossils. 25 species belonging 6 genera of pl...

The Devonian marks a critical stage in the early evolution of vertebrates: It opens with an unprecedented diversity of fishes and closes with the earliest evidence of limbed tetrapods. However, the latter part of the Devonian has also been characterized as a period of global biotic crisis marked by two large extinction pulses: a "Big Five" mass extinction event at the Frasnian-Famennian stage b...

Here we present a new species of placoderm fish, Africanaspis edmountaini sp. nov., and redescribe Africanaspis doryssa on the basis of new material collected from the type locality of Africanaspis. The new material includes the first head shields of Africanaspis doryssa in addition to soft anatomy for both taxa. Hitherto Africanaspis was entirely described from trunk armour and no record of bo...

Compressions and impressions of an isoetalean lycopsid, comprising lower portions of stems, lobed bases, attached rootlets, and rounded rootlet scars, discovered in Late Devonian (Famennian) rocks of Clinton County, north-central Pennsylvania, Appalachian Basin, USA, are here described as Otzinachsonia beerboweri, gen. et sp. nov. These specimens demonstrate unequivocally the existence of the i...