"Placoderms are an extinct group of early jawed vertebrates that play a key role in understanding the evolution of the gnathostome body plan, including the origin of novelties such as jaws, teeth, and pelvic fins. As placoderms have a poorly ossified axial skeleton, preservation of the mainly carti...
"Ecosystem services such as food provisioning, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, or recreation in open landscapes underpin human wellbeing. They are highly dependent on land use, land cover and utilization pattern as well as environmental factors like climate, topography and soil. In consequenc...
"Geoparks in China have been a great success story, with 284 national geoparks and 41 of them accorded UNESCO international status, the highest number for any country in the world. We track the progress of one of the geoparks, Luoping Biota National Geopark in Yunnan Province, from initial plans af...
"We use natural language processing (NLP) to retrieve location data for cheilostome bryozoan species (text-mined occurrences (TMO)) in an automated procedure. We compare these results with data combined from two major public databases (DB): the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), and the ...
"The eastern Anti-Atlas is renowned for its highly fossiliferous outcrops of Devonian rocks. Ammonoids occur in rock-forming numbers at many localities in the Tafilalt and Maïder. This study addresses the questions of how many ammonoids are preserved within a standardized area as well as over the w...
"Jurassic ichthyosaurs dominated upper trophic levels of marine ecosystems. Many species coexisted alongside each another, and it is uncertain whether they competed for the same array of food or divided dietary resources, each specializing in different kinds of prey. Here, we test whether feeding d...
"The Early Jurassic Jenkyns Event (~183 Ma) was characterized in terrestrial environments by global warming, perturbation of the carbon cycle, enhanced weathering and wildfires. Heating and acid rain on land caused a loss of forests and affected diversity and composition of land plant assemblages a...
"The trilobite head served multiple functions and was composed of several fused segments. Yet, the underlying organization of the trilobite head, and whether patterns are conserved across trilobites, remains unclear. Modeling the head as being composed of modules, or subunits that vary and thus...
REPLYING TO S. Meiri & E. Levin Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32715-0 (2022)
In an article examining the physiology of Early Jurassic mammaliaform stem-mammals, we used proxies for basal and maximum metabolic rate, providing evidence that two ke...
"For the taxon comprising all Devonian to Cretaceous ammonoids, a variety of conflicting names with different authorship and taxonomic rank are available and have been repeatedly cited. Here, we review the primary literature and suggest the appropriate name, authorship and date of publication; we s...
