The rock record contains a rich variety of sedimentary surface textures on siliciclastic
sandstone, siltstone and mudstone bedding planes. In recent years, an increasing number …

During the mid-Palaeozoic, vascular land plants (ie, tracheophytes) underwent a great
radiation that triggered the development of the land biosphere–the so-called Silurian …

The latest Neoproterozoic extinction of the Ediacara biota has been variously attributed to
catastrophic removal by perturbations to global geochemical cycles,'biotic replacement'by …

Accumulated records of organic microfossils span billions of years of Earth history. The
majority of this record consists of prokaryotes plus eukaryotes of a protistan grade, yet this …

Extinction of species, and even clades, is a normal part of the macroevolutionary process.
However, several times in Earth history the rate of species and clade extinctions increased …

Pterosaurs, a Mesozoic group of flying archosaurs, have become a focal point for debates
pertaining to the impact of sampling biases on our reading of the fossil record, as well as the …

Factor analysis of a data set representing the global distribution of vascular plant families
through time shows the broad pattern of vegetation history can be explained in terms of five …

The fossil record documents the history of life, but the reliability of that record has often been
questioned. Spatiotemporal variability in sedimentary rock volume, sampling and research …

Most early Palaeozoic acritarchs are thought to represent a part of the marine phytoplankton
and so constituted a significant element at the base of the marine trophic chain during the …

Ichthyosaurs were highly successful marine reptiles with an abundant and well‐studied
fossil record. However, their occurrences through geological time and space are sporadic …