"Insular woodiness (IW)—the evolutionary transition from herbaceousness towards woodiness on islands—is one of the most iconic features of island floras. Since pioneering work by Darwin and Wallace, five IW drivers have been proposed: (i) favourable aseasonal climate and (ii) lack of large native h...
"The cephalopod arm armature is certainly one of the most important morphological innovations responsible for the evolutionary success of the Cephalopoda. New palaeontological discoveries in the recent past afford to review and reassess origin and homology of suckers, sucker rings, hooks, and cirri...
"Extant marine arthropods are afflicted by a variety of parasitic diseases making it plausible that extinct trilobites also had a variety of parasites. Direct evidence in the form of preserved parasite body fossils is lacking to date, which is not surprising considering the poor preservation potent...
"Conodonts are some of the most important biostratigraphic index fossils in the Paleozoic and Triassic because of their rapid evolution and extensive distribution. Here we present a cladistic analysis of Early Triassic conodonts to reexamine the systematic classification and evolutionary relationsh...
"The Ordovician (∼487 to 443 Ma) ended with the formation of extensive Southern Hemisphere ice sheets, known as the Hirnantian glaciation, and the second largest mass extinction in Earth History. It was followed by the Silurian (∼443 to 419 Ma), one of the most climatically unstable periods of the ...
"Findings of ammonoid soft tissues are extremely rare compared to the rich fossil record of ammonoid conchs ranging from the Late Devonian to the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. Here, we apply the computed-tomography approach to detect ammonoid soft tissue remains in well-preserved fossils from the ...
"Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening biodiversity on a global scale. Rich spots of biodiversity, regions with exceptionally high endemism and/or number of species, are a top priority for nature conservation. Terrestrial studies have hypothesized that rich spots occur in places ...
"Climbing activities affect cliff site species. With cliff sites harbouring unique species communities, the rise in popularity of outdoor climbing activities is a major threat. In this study, we assessed a previously unclimbed boulder before, during and after 500 climbing ascents. We observed an ov...
"The second-order Pliensbachian–Toarcian crisis affected major groups of marine organisms. While its impact has been intensively studied for ammonites, the response of belemnites is only currently emerging through quantitative studies. Novel overall and regional diversity analyses suggest that bele...
"Conodonts were the first vertebrates to develop mineralized dental tools, known as elements. Recent research suggests that conodonts were macrophagous predators and/or scavengers but we do not know how this feeding habit emerged in the earliest coniform conodonts, since most studies focus on the d...
