Despite increasing claims of pre-Cretaceous angiosperms, whether there really are angiosperms in the Jurassic is apparently still an open question for many people before further evidence is available. This question can only be answered by studying more Jurassic plant fossils. Here we report a fossil angiosperm, gen. et sp. nov, from the Middle Jurassic of Inner Mongolia, China. The plant includes connected stem, leaves, flowers, aggregate fruits, fruitlets, and seeds within fruitlets. The leaves are helically arranged along the curving stem, linear in shape, with 5-6 parallel veins. The aggregate fruit is pedicellate, composed of over 20 carpels/fruitlets helically arranged. Each fruitlet encloses a seed. The reproductive organs in various stages are found in the same plant, allowing us to understand the development of . The occurrence of in the Middle Jurassic re-confirms the Jurassic history for angiosperms that has been suggested by other independent research and adds to the on-going study on the early evolution of angiosperms.

Flower, enclosed ovule and tetrasporangiate anther are three major characters distinguishing angiosperms from other seed plants. Morphologically, typical flowers are characterised by an organisation with gynoecium and androecium surrounded by corolla and calyx. Theoretically, flowers are derived from their counterparts in ancient ancestral gymnosperms. However, as for when, how and from which groups, there is no consensus among botanists yet. Although angiosperm-like pollen and angiosperms have been claimed in the Triassic and Jurassic, typical flowers with the aforesaid three key characters are still missing in the pre-Cretaceous age, making many interpretations of flower evolution tentative. Thus searching for flower in the pre-Cretaceous has been a tantalising task for palaeobotanists for a long time. Here, we report a typical flower, , from the Middle-Late Jurassic of Liaoning, China. has sepals, petals, androecium with tetrasporangiate dithecate anthers and gynoecium with enclosed ovules, organised just like in perfect flowers of extant angiosperms. The discovery of implies that typical angiosperm flowers have already been in place in the Jurassic, and provides a new insight unavailable otherwise for the evolution of flowers.

A series of Oligocene through Early Miocene terrestrial deposits preserved in the foothills of the Zinda Pir Dome of western Pakistan produce multiple, superposed fossil mammal localities. These include small mammal assemblages that shed light on the evolution of rodent lineages, especially Muroidea, in South Asia. Nine small mammal localities span approximately 28-19 Ma, an interval encompassing the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. The Early Miocene rodent fossil assemblages are dominated by muroid rodents, but muroids are uncommon and archaic in earlier Oligocene horizons. The Zinda Pir sequence includes the evolutionary transition to modern Muroidea at about the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. We review the muroid record for the Zinda Pir Dome, which includes the early radiation of primitive bamboo rats (Rhizomyinae) and early members of the modern muroid radiation, which lie near crown Cricetidae and Muridae. The Zinda Pir record dates diversification of modern muroids in the Indian Subcontintent and establishment by 19 Ma of muroid assemblages characteristic of the later Siwaliks.

The biogeographical history of pterosaurs has received very little treatment. Here, we present the first quantitative analysis of pterosaurian biogeography based on an event-based parsimony method (Treefitter). This approach was applied to a phylogenetic tree comprising the relationships of 108 in-group pterosaurian taxa, spanning the full range of this clade's stratigraphical and geographical extent. The results indicate that there is no support for the impact of vicariance or coherent dispersal on pterosaurian distributions. However, this group does display greatly elevated levels of sympatry. Although sampling biases and taxonomic problems might have artificially elevated the occurrence of sympatry, we argue that our results probably reflect a genuine biogeographical signal. We propose a novel model to explain pterosaurian distributions: pterosaurs underwent a series of 'sweep-stakes' dispersal events (across oceanic barriers in most cases), resulting in the founding of sympatric clusters of taxa. Examination of the spatiotemporal distributions of pterosaurian occurrences indicates that their fossil record is extremely patchy. Thus, while there is likely to be genuine information on pterosaurian diversity and biogeographical patterns in the current data-set, caution is required in its interpretation.

The Glass Flowers Collection, commissioned from Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, was created in 1886 through 1936 to illustrate the plant kingdom for the Botanical Museum at Harvard University. The models are both examples of superb flameworking, and represent botanical sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Blaschkas' reference materials and the artistic license they sometimes incorporated are discussed. Emphasis is given to the early lifecycle series (1889, 1893) and the last models that depict blight on temperate fruits (1929, 1932, 1936).

The Humboldt University of Berlin has a collection of Blaschka models which came from the teaching collection of the Zoological Institute and the former exhibition of the Museum of Natural History. Besides those from the Blaschkas other models from model makers like Adolf and Friedrich Ziegler in Freiburg, Rudolf Weisker and Paul Loth in Leipzig, Paul Osterloh, Marcus Sommer, and others were used for teaching purposes in the Zoological Institute. They were created in close cooperation between scientists, craftsmen, and artists and tell us about anatomical and zoological research of their time. The origin, history and application of different types of models are explained and compared.

The use of the Blaschka marine models in North American educational institutions from 1870-1890 is detailed. Historical records of purchase from the Henry Augustus Ward papers and Leopold Blaschka's business notebooks and correspondence were examined to show how the models were received by curators and educators in North America, the significance of the models in marine biology education for secondary school teachers, and the role that Ward's Natural History Establishment played in the distribution of the models. A historical perspective of the business relationship between Henry Ward and Leopold Blaschka is presented. The taxa of the models ordered in North America are documented, as is the use of models demonstrating ontogeny of the organism. Educational practices of the period are explicated and the uses of the models to support contemporary biological concepts of the organism are elucidated through examination of Model 191a, a male colony of the hydroid, Tubularia.

The presence of the diseases yaws and bejel are indicated by periosteal reaction patterns. The distributions of these two diseases in ancient North American human populations show evidence of climatic influence. Those ancient populations lacking either yaws or bejel (the null periosteal reaction pattern) can be found in the coldest parts of the Cold Winter Regions. Those populations with yaws (the poly-ostotic periosteal reaction) can be found in the milder portions of the Cold Winter Regions. The populations with bejel (the pauci-ostotic periosteal reaction) are found either outside of or marginal to Cold Winter Regions. The Bering Strait area is considered to be the gateway to the ancient New World. The cold climates present in this area should have influenced the routes available for the diseases to spread from population to population or by migration of infected populations into the Western Hemisphere. It is suggested that the coastal route with its milder maritime climate was the route taken by yaws when it entered the New World. The presence of bejel in ancient North America presents a conundrum. The climate would have blocked the spread of the disease from Siberia to Alaska in either Late Glacial or Holocene times. This suggests that our present view of migration routes is incomplete.

The highly fossiliferous Eocene deposits of the Antarctic Peninsula are among the most productive sites for fossil remains in the Southern Hemisphere and offer rare insights into high-latitude faunas during the Palaeogene. Chondrichthyans, which are represented by abundant isolated remains, seemingly dominate the marine assemblages. Eocene Antarctic sawsharks have only been known from few isolated rostral spines up to now, that were assigned to . Here, we present the first oral teeth of a sawshark from the Eocene of Seymour Island and a re-evaluation of previously described remains from Gondwana consisting exclusively of rostral spines. The holotype of represents a single, abraded and insufficiently illustrated spine from the Oligocene of New Zealand. All other Cenozoic rostral spines assigned to this species are morphologically very indistinct and closely resemble those of living taxa. Consequently, we regard this species as dubious and introduce a new species, , based on oral teeth. The combination of dental characteristics of the new species makes it unique compared to all other described species based on oral teeth. Rostral spines from the Eocene of Seymour Island are assigned to this new species whereas those from other Cenozoic Gondwana localities remain ambiguous.

Here we report the first record of one of the most common and widespread Palaeogene selachians, the sand tiger shark , from the Ypresian Bolca Konservat-Lagerstätte. The combination of dental character of the 15 isolated teeth collected from the Pesciara and Monte Postale sites (e.g. anterior teeth up to 25 mm with fairly low triangular cusp decreasing regularly in width; one to two pairs of well-developed lateral cusplets; root with broadly separated lobes; upper teeth with a cusp bent distally) supports their assignment to the odontaspidid (Casier, 1946), a species widely spread across the North Hemisphere during the early Palaeogene. The unambiguous first report of this lamniform shark in the Eocene Bolca Konservat-Lagerstätte improves our knowledge concerning the diversity and palaeobiology of the cartilaginous fishes of this palaeontological site, and provides new insights about the biotic turnovers that involved the high trophic levels of the marine settings after the end-Cretaceous extinction.

Eocene deposits of the famous La Meseta Formation of Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, yielded the most diverse Paleogene fossil elasmobranch association of the Southern Hemisphere. In this assemblage, sharks clearly dominate the fauna, whereas batoids are very rare components. Herein, we describe two new taxa of cold water tolerant skates, gen. et sp. nov., and gen. et sp. nov., two new species of the genus , sp. nov. and sp. nov., as well as remains of warm water adapted myliobatiforms. It is, however, not possible to unambiguously assign these remains either to Myliobatidae or Rhinopteridae, or to any specific genus. Previously reported remains of / sp. are assigned to the new described species sp. nov. The biogeographic distribution of extant and extinct rays and skates clearly shows that both groups are more widely distributed today than in the past, and additionally seem to have been more diverse in the Northern than the Southern Hemisphere. The occurrence, albeit rare of isolated teeth of skates (Rajidae) and rays (Myliobatidae) in the La Meseta Formation representes a minimum age constraint for their first appearance in the Southern Ocean.

The Spence Shale Member of the Langston Formation in northern Utah and southern Idaho preserves generally non-biomineralized fossil assemblages referred to as the Spence Shale Lagerstätte. The biota of this Lagerstätte is dominated by panarthropods, both biomineralized and soft-bodied examples, but also preserves diverse infaunal organisms, including species of scalidophorans, echinoderms, lobopodians, stalked filter feeders, and various problematic taxa. To date, however, only a single annelid fossil, originally assigned to sp., has been described from the Spence Shale. This lone specimen and another recently collected specimen were analyzed in this study using scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry. The previous occurrence is reassigned to cf. Walcott, 1911. The new fossil, however, is identified as a novel polychaete taxon, gen. et sp. nov., characterized by the presence of fused, bladed chaetae and a wide body. The occurrence of is the first outside the Burgess Shale and its vicinity, whereas gen. et sp. nov. adds to the diversity of annelids in the middle Cambrian and highlights the diversity of the Spence Shale Lagerstätte.