This monograph presents the results of over 10 years of paleontological and geological survey in the Baynunah Formation of the United Arab Emirates. Exposed widely in western Abu Dhabi Emirate, the Baynunah Formation and its fossils provide the only record of terrestrial environments and evolution in the Arabian Peninsula during the late Miocene epoch (12-5 Ma). This volume describes new fossils collected since 2002, presented systematically by taxon, and including mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates, as well as fossil trackways. The discoveries are framed within the results of new geological, geochemical, and geochrononological analyses, providing an updated and synthetic view of the age, environments, and biogeographic relationships of this important fossil assemblage.

The extended continental South American turtle record (Norian to Lujanian) allows us to follow the evolution of this reptile clade from its origins. Several significant stem turtle taxa such as: Palaeochersis talampayensis and Condorchelys antiqua provide information on the first steps of turtle evolution. Others such as: Chubutemys copelloi or Patagoniaemys gasparinae provide clues to the origin of the bizarre horned tortoises of the clade Meiolaniidae. The panpleurodiran species such as Notoemys laticentralis or Notoemys zapatocaensis shed light on the origin of modern pleurodiran turtles. This book explores aquatic and terrestrial cryptodiran turtles, South Gondwana pleurodiran turtles, North Gondwana pleurodiran turtles; Meiolaniforms and early differentiation of Mesozoic turtles.

The Rhaetian Penarth Group includes the former Westbury Beds, Cotham Beds, and White Lias. It crops out in a narrow strip from the Devon and Dorset coast to the mouth of the Tees, and is particularly well known from the exposures along the Bristol Channel. This diverse suite of late Triassic sedimentary rocks is internationally famous for the fossils that it yields, most notably from the bone beds. Coverage is comprehensive, with separate chapters on foraminifera, gastropods, bivalves, crustaceans, insects, echinoderms, other invertebrates, conodonts, fish, tetrapods, trace fossils and plants. There are background chapters on sedimentology, stratigraphy and the formation of the bone beds. The guide is copiously illustrated with specimens from all major UK public collections of Penarth Group fossils illustrated on 26 plates and 30 text-figures. It will be of use both to collectors who want to know more about this diverse and interesting suite of fossils, as well as to students of geology who wish to understand their conditions of deposition and accumulation.

This highly accessible introduction to dinosaurs places scientific method at the crux of the studies, teaching students about scientific research and principles as they learn about dinosaurs. Now in its second edition, the text includes updates on recent finds, increased coverage of evolution and physiology, and an expanded and improved illustration program.
Balances scientific rigour with real world examples.
This new edition includes updates on recent finds and an increased coverage of evolution and physiology.
Also features end of chapter discussion questions, easy reference glossary, new references at the end of each chapter, and high-quality, full color figures and photographs throughout.
Supplemented by a dedicated web page, www.blackwellpublishing.com/dinosaurs with interactive material and all art in downloadable form (art also available to instructors on CD-Rom).

Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) have fascinated and bewildered humans throughout history. Their mammalian affinities have been long recognized, but exactly which group of terrestrial mammals they descend from has, until recently, remained in the dark. Recent decades have produced a flurry of new fossil cetaceans, extending their fossil history to over 50 million years ago. Along with new insights from genetics and developmental studies, these discoveries have helped to clarify the place of cetaceans among mammals, and enriched our understanding of their unique adaptations for feeding, locomotion and sensory systems. Their continuously improving fossil record and successive transformation into highly specialized marine mammals have made cetaceans a textbook case of evolution - as iconic in its own way as the origin of birds from dinosaurs. This book aims to summarize our current understanding of cetacean evolution for the serious student and interested amateur using photographs, drawings, charts and illustrations.

How fast is evolution, and why does it matter? The rate of evolution, and whether it is gradual or punctuated, is a hotly debated topic among biologists and paleontologists. This book compiles and compares examples of evolution from laboratory, field, and fossil record studies, analyzing them to extract their underlying rates. It concludes that while change is slow when averaged over many generations, on a generation-to-generation time scale, evolution is rapid. Chapters cover the history of evolutionary studies, from Lamarck and Darwin in the nineteenth century to the present day. An overview of the statistics of variation, dynamics of random walks, processes of natural selection and random drift, and effects of scale and time averaging are also provided, along with methods for the analysis of evolutionary time series. Containing case studies and worked examples, this book is ideal for advanced students and researchers in paleontology, biology, and anthropology.

Invertebrate Palaeontology and Evolution is well established as the foremost palaeontology text at the undergraduate level. This fully revised fourth edition includes a complete update of the sections on evolution and the fossil record, and the evolution of the early metazoans.* New work on the classification of the major phyla (in particular brachiopods and molluscs) has been incorporated.* The section on trace fossils is extensively rewritten.* The author has taken care to involve specialists in the major groups, to ensure the taxonomy is as up--to--date and accurate as possible.

Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from with infallible certainty--"Show me the bone, and I will describe the animal!" Paleontologists such as Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen were heralded as scientific virtuosos, sometimes even veritable wizards, capable of resurrecting the denizens of an ancient past from a mere glance at a fragmentary bone. Such extraordinary feats of predictive reasoning relied on the law of correlation, which proposed that each element of an animal corresponds mutually with each of the others, so that a carnivorous tooth must be accompanied by a certain kind of jawbone, neck, stomach, limbs, and feet. Show Me the Bone tells the story of the rise and fall of this famous claim, tracing its fortunes from Europe to America and showing how it persisted in popular science and literature and shaped the practices of paleontologists long after the method on which it was based had been refuted. In so doing, Gowan Dawson reveals how decisively the practices of the scientific elite were--and still are--shaped by their interactions with the general public.

The highly fossiliferous succession of Smithian (Early Triassic) ammonoids from northwestern Guangxi (South China) provides a key equatorial record, at the boundary between Tethys and Panthalassa. After the end-Permian extinction, ammonoids reached their first major diversity peak during Smithian times, coupled with a marked contrast in their latitudinal distribution. This monograph contains a part of the fundamental taxonomic and biostratigraphic data of a more comprehensive research project addressing patterns of recovery in time and space of Early Triassic ammonoids and other marine clades, in conjunction with global paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic changes.

This book presents perspectives on the past and present state of the understanding of snake origins. It reviews and critiques data and ideas from paleontology and neontology (herpetology), as well as ideas from morphological and molecular phylogenetics. The author reviews the anatomy and morphology of extant snakes. Methods are also critiqued, including those empirical and theoretical methods employed to hypothesize ancestral ecologies for snakes. The modern debate on squamate phylogeny and snake ingroup phylogeny using molecules and morphology is examined critically to provide insights on origins and evolution. Key Features Important major evolutionary transformation in vertebrate evolution Continuing historical debate in vertebrate paleontology Of wide interest to a core audience of paleontologists, herpetologists, and morphologists Author acknowledged as prominent contributor to debate over snake origins Based on remarkable well preserved fossil specimens

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the taxonomy, biology, sedimentation, and carbonate geochemistry of modern species. Students, early career and advanced scientists alike will profit from a broad synthesis of the current understanding of planktic foraminifers as an ecological indicator, biogeochemical factories, and proxies in paleoceanography. The classification of modern species is amply illustrated with electron and light microscope images of morphotypes, addresses the state-of-the-art of molecular genetics of species, and provides a detailed guide for any laboratory analyses. The biology of planktic foraminifers is extensively discussed in chapters dedicated to the cellular ultrastructure, nutrition, symbionts, reproduction, ontogeny, and test architecture. Building on the biological prerequisites, the distribution of planktic foraminifers is discussed at regional to global scale. The geochemistry and sedimentation of tests are considered in relation to the ecology of the living animal. In the final chapter, which examines the most common methods in planktic foraminifer research, hands-on information is provided on sampling, processing and analyzing samples in the laboratory, as well as selected established methods for data interpretation. The various topics discussed in this book are aimed at the application of planktic foraminifers as sensitive indicators of the changing climate and marine environment.

A paleontology publication of the Scandinavian University Press The detailed written study, Silurian Nuculoid and Modiomorphid Bivalves from Sweden, is part of an international series on stratigraphy and paleontology.

This monograph describes early Ordovician (Ibexian:Tremadocian early Floian) trilobites from Northern Spitsbergen from the section through the Kirtonryggen Formation adjacent to Hinlopen Strait. The Formation is divided into three Members, each with distinct trilobites collectively representing the fullest known succession from the Bathyurid biofacies of the eastern Laurentian carbonate platform. Previous research on the Ordovician of Spitsbergen is summarised and correlations with similar faunas previously described from Canada, Greenland, western Newfoundland, Vermont New York State, Oklahoma and Missouri are discussed. Taxonomic problems are discussed in detail leading to the recognition of 53 species, of which 15 are new, belonging to 31 genera including four new. Twenty-four taxa are described under open or tentative nomenclature. The lower Member yields the earliest known occurrences of the Illaenoidea, Proetoidea and Scutelluoidea, supporting the hypotheses relating the origin of new major clades to inshore habitats.

The Paleobiological Revolution chronicles the incredible ascendance of the once-maligned science of paleontology to the vanguard of a field. With the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. Pairing contributions from some of the leading actors of the transformation with overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual development of modern paleobiology.

The first English translation of Johannes Weigelt's 1927 classic makes available the seminal work in taphonomy, the study of how organisms die, decay, become entombed in sediments, and fossilize over time. Weigelt emphasized the importance of empirical work and made extensive observations of modern carcasses on the Texas Gulf Coast. He applied the results to evidence from the fossil record and demonstrated that an understanding of the postmortem fate of modern animals is crucial to making sound inferences about fossil vertebrate assemblages and their ecological communities. Weigelt spent sixteen months on the Gulf Coast in the mid-1920s, gathering evidence from the carcasses of cattle and other animals in the early stages of preservation. This book reports his observations. He discusses death and decomposition; classifies various modes of death (drowning, cold, dehydration, fire, mud, quicksand, oil slicks, etc.); documents and analyzes the positions of carcasses; presents detailed data on carcass assemblages at the Smither's Lake site in Texas; and, in a final chapter, makes comparisons to carcass assemblages from the geologic past. He raises questions about whether much of the fossil record is a product of unusual events and, if so, what the implications are for paleoecological studies. The English edition of Recent Vertebrate Carcasses includes a foreword and a translator's note that comment on Weigelt's life and the significance of his work. The original bibliography has been brought up to date, and, where necessary, updated scientific and place names have been added to the text in brackets. An index of names, places, and subjects is included, and Weigelt's own photographs of carcasses and drawings of skeletons illustrate the text.

Trace fossils are the products of the activities of ancient organisms, including tracks, trails, burrows, borings, eggs and faecal remains. The importance of these fossils compared with body fossils (shells, bones) is that they provide the palaeontologist with evidence of how the ancient organism actually functioned, including activities such as locomotion, feeding, reproduction and social behaviour, for which no other data exist. They also provide the only evidence of the existence of soft-bodied organisms for which no other fossil material has survived.

Plants in Mesozoic Time showcases the latest research of broad botanical and paleontological interest from the world s experts on Mesozoic plant life. Each chapter covers a special aspect of a particular plant group ranging from horsetails to ginkgophytes, from cycads to conifers and relates it to key innovations in structure, phylogenetic relationships, the Mesozoic flora, or to animals such as plant-eating dinosaurs. The book s geographic scope ranges from Antarctica and Argentina to the western interior of North America, with studies on the reconstruction of the Late Jurassic vegetation of the Morrison Formation and on fossil angiosperm lianas from Late Cretaceous deposits in Utah and New Mexico. The volume also includes cutting-edge studies on the evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") of Mesozoic forests, the phylogenetic analysis of the still enigmatic bennettitaleans, and the genetic developmental controls of the oldest flowers in the fossil record."

The story of life's splendid drama has captivated generations of the general public, just as it has intrigued biologists, especially those who began to try to solve evolutionary puzzles in the years immediately after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Yet histories of the Darwinian revolution have paid far more attention to theoretical debates and have largely ignored the researchers who struggled to comprehend the deeper evolutionary significance of fossil bones and the structures of living animals. Peter J. Bowler recovers some of this lost history in Life's Splendid Drama, the definitive account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and bio-geography. "Intriguing and insightful."-William Kimler, American Scientist "[A] volume of impressive scholarship and extensive references."-Library Journal "One of Bowler's best."-Kevin Padian, Nature "[Bowler's] comprehensive review of the various debates and ideas in taxonomy, morphology, and vertebrate evolution . . . deserves the attention of biologists and other scholars interested in the history of ideas."-Choice "The persistence of pre-Darwinian modes of thought in contemporary biology underlines the importance of Bowler's book. Its value is not only in the history it provides, but also in the way it illumines the present."-Peter J. Causton, Boston Book Review

From the outback of Australia to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and the savanna of Madagascar, the award-winning science writer and dinosaur enthusiast John Pickrell embarks on a world tour of new finds, meeting the fossil hunters who work at the frontier of discovery. He reveals the dwarf dinosaurs unearthed by an eccentric Transylvanian baron; an aquatic, crocodile-snouted carnivore bigger than T. rex that once lurked in North African waterways; a Chinese dinosaur with wings like a bat; and a Patagonian sauropod so enormous it weighed more than two commercial jet airliners. Other surprising discoveries hail from Alaska, Siberia, Canada, Burma, and South Africa. Why did dinosaurs grow so huge? How did they spread across the world? Did they all have feathers? What do sauropods have in common with 1950s vacuum cleaners? The stuff of adventure movies and scientific revolutions, Weird Dinosaurs examines the latest breakthroughs and new technologies that are radically transforming our understanding of the distant past. Pickrell opens a vivid portal to a brand-new age of fossil discovery, in which fossil hunters are routinely redefining what we know and how we think about prehistory's most iconic and fascinating creatures.

Precambrian Geotectonics in the Himalaya provides an overview on general geology and tectonics of all the Precambrian domains of the Himalayan terrain. Authored by an expert with over five decades of laboratory, field and publication experience, the book studies the "Window" zones to provide a scope for understanding Precambrian deformation effects. The book fills a gap in literature, specifically covering the Precambrian geotectonic picture of the terrain. Considering Precambrian regional events are not clearly recognized or visualized in many sectors due to overlapping crystallines, this book details a Precambrian geotectonic framework of the terrain on which the Himalayan event evolved. This book is a necessary reference guide for Earth scientists, exploration and hazard management scientists, professors, students and anyone who carries out research that requires a comprehensive picture of the Precambrian Himalaya and the adjacent peninsula.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Scarcity Slot is the first book to critically examine food security in Africa's deep past. Amanda L. Logan argues that African foodways have been viewed through the lens of 'the scarcity slot,' a kind of Othering based on presumed differences in resources. Weaving together archaeological, historical, and environmental data with food ethnography, she advances a new approach to building long-term histories of food security on the continent in order to combat these stereotypes. Focusing on a case study in Banda, Ghana that spans the past six centuries, The Scarcity Slot reveals that people thrived during a severe, centuries-long drought just as Europeans arrived on the coast, with a major decline in food security emerging only recently. This narrative radically challenges how we think about African foodways in the past with major implications for the future.

Cognitive Archeology, Body Cognition, and the Evolution of Visuospatial Perception offers comprehensive perspective on the role of brain form and function, body cognition, and visuospatial integration in the evolution of ancient and modern human species. The book covers evolutionary neuroanatomy, cognitive sciences, and experimental archaeology, providing a bridge between anthropology and evolutionary studies to neurosciences. Written by international experts in paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology, as well as neurobiology and psychology, the book explores how body perception and spatial capacity may have evolved to enhance a "prosthetic capacity" able to integrate the brain, body and technological discoveries into a single functional system. Chapters discuss the anatomy, function and evolution of the parietal cortex in human and non-human primates. In addition, the book covers the evolution of visuospatial cognition and how modern brain imaging can trace these changes back millions of years.

Ostracod crustaceans, common microfossils in marine and freshwater sedimentary records, supply evidence of past climatic conditions via indicator species, transfer function and mutual climatic range approaches as well as the trace element and stable isotope geochemistry of their shells. As methods of using ostracods as Quaternary palaeoclimate proxies have developed, so too has a critical awareness of their complexities, potential and limitations. This book combines up-to-date reviews (covering previous work and summarising the state of the art) with presentations of new, cutting-edge science (data and interpretations as well as methodological developments) to form a major reference work that will constitute a durable bench-mark in the science of Ostracoda and Quaternary climate change.
In-depth and focused treatment of palaeoclimate applicationsProvides durable benchmark and guide for all future work on ostracodsPresents new, cutting-edge science
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This beautiful volume introduces the incredible animals that populated the planet before the Age of the Dinosaurs. Readers voyage to a time, beginning about 370 million years ago, when the first four-footed vertebrates appeared, and ending 200 million years later at the moment when the dinosaurs begin their ascent. During this time, vertebrates emerge from the sea and there appears a parade of animals, each more astonishing than the last. On this expedition, we learn how paleontologists become detectives to understand the history of life and we discover that many widely held ideas about the evolution of species are completely false. Earth before the Dinosaurs is an entertaining and informative guide to an astonishing and little-known world.