New simplified tectonic models and depositional history of Late Cretaceous rocks are established in a part of Zagros Orogenic Belt that is located in the Northeastern Iraq. These rocks constutes the most important Cretaceous oil reservoir in the Middle East. The dependent tools are petrography, field study and the concept of drowning phases. This concept is relatively new and accurate in explan...

A new braconid wasp from the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian) amber of the Hukawng Valley in Kachin State, Myanmar is described and figured from a unique female. Seneciobracon novalatus Engel & Huang, gen. et sp. n., is placed in a distinct subfamily, Seneciobraconinae Engel & Huang, subfam. n., owing to the presence of a unique combination of primitive protorhyssaline-like traits, with an otherwi...

The Upper Cretaceous was a period when reefs and reef mounds were abundant in many parts of the world (JAMES, 1983). One of the most remarkable features of the Cretaceous carbonate platforms in tropical and subtropical environments of the Tethyan realm, was the development of facies complexes dominated by rudists, with or without associated corals (MASSE & PHILIP, 1981; ROSS & SKELTON, 1993; GI...

We describe a giant titanosaurid sauropod dinosaur discovered in coastal deposits in the Upper Cretaceous Bahariya Formation of Egypt, a unit that has produced three Tyrannosaurus-sized theropods and numerous other vertebrate taxa. Paralititan stromeri is the first tetrapod reported from Bahariya since 1935. Its 1.69-meter-long humerus is longer than that of any known Cretaceous sauropod. The a...

Eremochaetidae is a rare family found from the Late Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous. So far, only 8 genera with 12 species have been recorded. Herein, we describe a new species, Dissup clausus sp. nov., and the first male of Eremomukha (E.) tsokotukha Mostovski, 1996, from the Yixian Formation, the Early Cretaceous of Northeastern China. Additionally, E. (E.) insidiosa Mostovski, 1996 is consi...

Jarvis et al. (Research Articles, 12 December 2014, p. 1320) presented molecular clock analyses that suggested that most modern bird orders diverged just after the mass extinction event at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (about 66 million years ago). We demonstrate that this conclusion results from the use of a single inappropriate maximum bound, which effectively precludes the Cretaceous div...

The study area is situated in the Middle part of the Tabas Block. It contains outcrops of rocks that formed along longitudinal faults in Early Cimmerian orogenic phase. The basin subsided along these faults from the Late Triassic to Early Cretaceous, which include two sedimentary cycles. A sedimentary cycle, related to Upper Triassic to Bajocian is known as Shemshak group. Another sedimentary c...

Courtship behaviours, frequent among modern insects, have left extremely rare fossil traces. None are known previously for fossil odonatans. Fossil traces of such behaviours are better known among the vertebrates, e.g. the hypertelic antlers of the Pleistocene giant deer Megaloceros giganteus. Here we describe spectacular extremely expanded, pod-like tibiae in males of a platycnemidid damselfly...

The butterfly family Nymphalidae contains some of the most important non-drosophilid insect model systems for evolutionary and ecological studies, yet the evolutionary history of the group has remained shrouded in mystery. We have inferred a robust phylogenetic hypothesis based on sequences of 10 genes and 235 morphological characters for exemplars of 400 of the 540 valid nymphalid genera repre...

Nodosaurids are poorly known from the Lower Cretaceous of Europe. Two associated ankylosaur skeletons excavated from the lower Albian carbonaceous member of the Escucha Formation near Ariño in northeastern Teruel, Spain reveal nearly all the diagnostic recognized character that define nodosaurid ankylosaurs. These new specimens comprise a new genus and species of nodosaurid ankylosaur and repre...