Earth and Life

Abstract

Series foreword.- Series preface.- Dedication.- Preface.- Introduction.- Authors, their addresses and contributions.- Articles of a general nature.- -Phanerozoic marine biodiversity: a fresh look at data, methods, patterns and processes.- -Coordinated stasis reconsidered: a perspective after fifteen years.- -Whilst this planet has gone cycling on: what role for periodic astronomical phenomena in large-scale patterns in the history of life?.- -Climate change through time.- -Development of intertidal biotas through Phanerozoic time.- -Marine sclerobiofacies: encrusting and endolithic communities on shells through time and space.- -Brachiopods and their auloporid epibionts in the Devonian of Boulonnais (France).- -Fossil fish taphonomy and the contribution of microfossils to documenting Devonian vertebrate history.- -The Messel Pit fossil site - the legacy of the environment and life of the Eocene.- Evolution exemplified by specific phyla or classes.- -Evolutionary scenario of the early history of the Animal Kingdom: evidence from Precambrian (Ediacaran) Weng'an and Early Cambrian Maotianshan biotas, China.- -The Ordovician Radiation: macroevolutionary crossroads of the Phanerozoic.- -Phylogeny of Palaeozoic gastropods inferred from their ontogeny.- -Palaeozoic innovations in the micro- and megafossil plant record: from the earliest plant spores to the earliest seeds.- -Tentaculitids - an enigmatic group of Palaeozoic fossils.- -Palaeozoic ammonoids - diversity and development of conch morphology.- -Quantitative approach to diversity and decline in Late Palaeozoic trilobites.- -Devonian cladid crinoid evolution, diversity, and first and last occurrences: summary observations.- -Palaeoecology, aerodynamics and the origins of avian flight.- Global extinction events and biocrises.- -The Ireviken Event in the Boree Creek Formation, New South Wales, Australia.- -Isotope geochemistry and plankton response to the Ireviken (earliest Wenlock) and Cyrtograptus lundgreni events, Cape Phillips Formation, Arctic Canada.- -Late Ludfordian (Silurian) correlations and the Lau Global Extinction Event.- -The late Middle Devonian (Givetian) global Taghanic Biocrisis in its type area (northern Appalachian Basin): geologically rapid faunal transitions driven by global and local environmental changes.- -The Permian - a time of major evolutions and revolutions in the history of life.- -Millennial physical events and the end-Permian mass mortality in the western Palaeo-Tethys: timing and primary causes.- -Chicxulub Impact, Deccan Traps and the K-T mass extinction.- -After mass extinction but no recovery: new tales of 'Dead Clade Walking' from Austral and Boreal post-K-Pg (Danian) assemblages.- -Fungi, a driving force in normalization of the terrestrial carbon cycle following the end-Cretaceous extinction.- Palaeobiogeography.- -Changes in the pattern of brachiopod biogeography in northern Asia through Early and Middle Devonian times.- -The paleogeography of Pennsylvanian crinoids and blastoids.- -Biogeography of Jurassic and Early Cretaceous ostracods from Western Australia and what they reveal about the evolution of the Indian Ocean.- -Cretaceous continental bridges, insularity, and vicariance in the southern hemisphere: which route did dinosaurs take?.- -Palaeobiogeography of Mesozoic mammals-revisited.- Cenozoic era.- -Cenozoic environmental shifts.- -Miocene asteroid impacts: proposed effects on the biogeography and extinction patterns of eastern North American gastropods.- -The rise of Australian marsupials: a synopsis of biostratigraphic, phylogenetic, palaeoecologic and palaeobiogeographic understanding.- A Perspective.-