After asking participants to propose analogies favoring a zerodeficit policy, Blanchette and Dunbar (2000) obtained a high proportion of base analogs lacking superficial similarities with the target, thus questioning the validity of a long experimental tradition demonstrating their centrality on retrieval. Through the use of culturally shared bases, we overcame two limitations in their study th...

BACKGROUND The early evolution of sauropod dinosaurs is poorly understood because of a highly incomplete fossil record. New discoveries of Early and Middle Jurassic sauropods have a great potential to lead to a better understanding of early sauropod evolution and to reevaluate the patterns of sauropod diversification. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS A new sauropod from the Middle Jurassic of Niger, Spinop...

The Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone of northern Arizona and southern Utah has yielded a diverse assemblage of late Early Jurassic terrestrial tetrapods from eolian and associated paleoenvironments. Although rare, vertebrate body fossils are represented by specimens of tritylodonts, crocodylomorphs, sauropodomorphs, and basal theropods (including Segisaurus halli). The vertebrate ichnofossil rec...

The discovery of a new stem turtle from the Middle Jurassic (Bathonian) deposits of the Isle of Skye, Scotland, sheds new light on the early evolutionary history of Testudinata. Eileanchelys waldmani gen. et sp. nov. is known from cranial and postcranial material of several individuals and represents the most complete Middle Jurassic turtle described to date, bridging the morphological gap betw...

The late Middle Jurassic–early Eocene (;120 m.y.) sediment-accumulation history of the Cordilleran foreland basin in northern Utah exhibits a sigmoidal pattern on a rate vs. time plot, with moderate rates of accumulation during late Middle Jurassic, very low net rates during Late Jurassic–earliest Cretaceous, increasingly rapid rates during Earlymiddle Cretaceous, and low rates during Late Cret...

Upper Jurassic strike-slip intra-arc basins formed along the axis of earlier Lower to Middle Jurassic extensional intra-arc basins in Arizona. These strike-slip basins developed along the Sawmill Canyon fault zone, which may represent an inboard strand of the Mojave-Sonora megashear system that did not necessarily produce large-scale translations. Subsidence in the Lower to Middle Jurassic exte...

BACKGROUND The Middle Jurassic was a critical time in the evolutionary history of ichthyosaurs. During this time interval, the diverse, well-studied faunas of the Lower Jurassic were entirely replaced by ophthalmosaurids, a new group that arose sometime prior to the Aalenian-Bajocian boundary and by the latest middle Jurassic comprised the only surviving group of ichthyosaurs. Thus, the Middle ...

Most fossil vertebrates of Jurassic age from Arizona are derived from the Glen Canyon Group on the southern Colorado Plateau in the northeastern part of the state. Glen Canyon Group strata of Jurassic age in Arizona that yield fossils include the upper Dinosaur Canyon and the Whitmore Point members of the Moenave Formation, the Kayenta Formation, and the Navajo Sandstone. All of these units yie...

Pseudosuchia, one of the two main clades of Archosauria (Reptilia: Diapsida), suffered a major decline in lineage diversity during the Triassic-Jurassic (TJ) mass extinction (approx. 201 Ma). Crocodylomorpha, including living crocodilians and their extinct relatives, is the only group of pseudosuchians that survived into the Jurassic. We reassess changes in pseudosuchian morphological diversity...

The structural configuration of SW Japan mainly reflects a late Jurassic-early Cretaceous orogeny. The region is divided into an inner belt and an outer belt, on the Japan sea and Pacific ocean sides respectively, by a strike-slip fault, the Median Tectonic Line (MTL). Both consist of a series of stacked nappes. The inner belt is divided into a Jurassic olistostrome known as the Tanba zone and ...