The discovery of fossilised struthious eggshell fragments on outcrops of the Marsawdad Formation, Rub’ Al-Khali, Oman, permits estimation of the age of the deposits, indicating correlation to the Late Miocene (Turolian-Ventian: Tortonian-Messinian) ca 8-7 Ma. The eggshells are described and are located within a revised biostratigraphy of the Cenozo...
L'intérêt porté aux carbonates continentaux n'a cessé de croitre ces dernières années pour leur usage comme réservoir géologique (géothermie, eau, stockage), comme matériaux (pierre de construction) ou pour la géotechnique, notamment dans la métropole du Grand Paris. Cependant, ces carbonates sont très hétérogènes, causant des variations spatiales ...
Premise of research. The Anacardiaceae family is distributed throughout the vegetated continents. The fossil record indicates extensive diversification of the family during the Paleogene and, in particular, during the Eocene. Despite the abundant fossil record of this period, there are only a few reliable anacardiaceous fossils in the Paris Basin. ...
Tipping points (TPs) in Earth's climate system have been the subject of increasing interest and concern in recent years, given the risk that anthropogenic forcing could cause abrupt, potentially irreversible, climate transitions. Paleoclimate records are essential for identifying past TPs and for gaining a thorough understanding of the underlying n...
Published in Frontiers in Earth Science
The Tarim Basin is the largest sedimentary basin in China, and it has experienced a complex tectonic evolutionary history. Reconstruction of the proto-type basin and tectono-paleogeography is helpful to understand the different stages of evolution of the sedimentary basin and basin-mountain relationship. It is significant to combine the basin with ...
Oligomonoctenus neytiriae gen. et sp. nov., the second fossil representative of the family Diprionidae from the uppermost Oligocene of Aix-en-Provence, France, is described on the basis of a well-preserved compression fossil. It is compared to the other extant and fossil diprionid genera. Its morphology and wing venation support placement in the su...
The Tibetan Plateau geographically contains internal and external drainage areas based on the distributions of river flows and catchments. The internal and external drainage areas display similar high elevations, while their topographic reliefs are not comparable; the former shows a large low-relief surface, whereas the latter is characterized by r...
Published in Biology letters
Among social insects, army ants are exceptional in their voracious coordinated predation, nomadic life history and highly specialized wingless queens: the synthesis of these remarkable traits is referred to as the army ant syndrome. Despite molecular evidence that the army ant syndrome evolved twice during the mid-Cenozoic, once in the Neotropics a...
The palaeobotanical record of Myanmar (Burma) is poorly documented despite its importance for understanding the evolution of Asian monsoonal ecosystems through time. Here, we describe 20 taxa of fossil wood from 30 silicified specimens collected in the upper lower to lowermost middle Miocene Natma Formation, central Myanmar. These fossils share aff...
Published in Contemporary Problems of Ecology
Two physical and climatic factors that were distant and recent prerequisites and a transformation trigger for a clone of the ancestral pseudotuberculous microbe Yersinia pseudotuberculosis O:1b (the causative agent of the Far East scarlet-like fever (FESLF)) into a population of the plague microbe derivative Y. pestis are considered. One remote pre...
