Paleontology

Joanne describes her listening experience of the audio version of life-science-popular-book-writer Hannah Holmes' "The Well Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself" as the more comprehensive and funnier updated version of the 1960s "The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris. Joanne's goal with book reviews is to be positive and intelligent and encourage the reluctant science reader to pick up a book and to let science enthusiasts know what is available on the bookshelves now.

Modern cell and developmental biology has a lot to contribute to our understanding of the deep history of animal origins, which until recently has been largely the province of paleontology. In this set of lectures, I hope to show how recent studies by a very small group of scientists on a virtually unknown phylum of marine organisms, the hemichordates, has helped explain some of the major mysteries of the origin of vertebrates. This is a tour of not only vertebrate origins but the...

Biotic response of Tethyan bathyal ostracodes through the Eocene-Oligocene Transition from the Massignano Composite Stratotype Section (east central Italy) - The Eocene-Oligocene Transition (EOT) is marked by a double-stepped ~1.3‰ positive excursion in d18O over an ~300 kyr interval (i.e., Oi-1; Miller et al., 1991; Zachos et al., 1996; Coxall et al., 2005) and a deepening of the calcium compensation depth (CCD) interpreted to represent marked Antarctic glaciation and global...