scholarly journals New fossil discoveries illustrate the diversity of past terrestrial ecosystems in New Caledonia

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Garrouste ◽  
Jérôme Munzinger ◽  
Andrew Leslie ◽  
Jessica Fisher ◽  
Nicolas Folcher ◽  
...  

AbstractNew Caledonia was, until recently, considered an old continental island harbouring a rich biota with outstanding Gondwanan relicts. However, deep marine sedimentation and tectonic evidence suggest complete submergence of the island during the latest Cretaceous to the Paleocene. Molecular phylogenies provide evidence for some deeply-diverging clades that may predate the Eocene and abundant post-Oligocene colonisation events. Extinction and colonization biases, as well as survival of some groups in refuges on neighbouring paleo-islands, may have obscured biogeographic trends over long time scales. Fossil data are therefore crucial for understanding the history of the New Caledonian biota, but occurrences are sparse and have received only limited attention. Here we describe five exceptional fossil assemblages that provide important new insights into New Caledonia’s terrestrial paleobiota from three key time intervals: prior to the submersion of the island, following re-emergence, and prior to Pleistocene climatic shifts. These will be of major importance for elucidating changes in New Caledonia’s floristic composition over time.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Garrouste ◽  
Jérôme Munzinger ◽  
Andrew Leslie ◽  
Jessica Fisher (deceaded) ◽  
Nicolas Folcher ◽  
...  

Abstract New Caledonia was, until recently, considered an old continental island harbouring a rich biota with outstanding Gondwanan relicts. However, deep marine sedimentation and tectonic evidence suggest complete submergence of the island during the latest Cretaceous to Paleocene. Molecular phylogenies provide evidence for some deeply-diverging clades that may predate the Eocene and abundant post-Oligocene colonisation events. Extinction and colonization biases, as well as survival of some groups in refugia on neighbouring paleo-islands may have obscured biogeographic trends over long time scales. Fossil data are therefore crucial for understanding the history of the New Caledonian biota, but occurrences are sparse and have received only limited attention. Here we describe five exceptional fossil assemblages that provide important new insights into New Caledonia’s terrestrial paleobiota from three key time intervals: prior to the submersion of the island, following re-emergence, and prior to Pleistocene climatic shifts. They reveal important changes in floristic composition over time, even between the early and late Miocene.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-111
Author(s):  
Irina I. Rutsinskaya

Historians have long been studying in detail the story of I.V. Stalin visiting V.I. Lenin in Razliv. The main subject of their interest is whether this event took place in reality. Most of modern authors agree that it did not. This article does not dispute this verdict, because it is not about the event itself, but about the history of the mythologeme’s origin and the forms of its representation in the culture of the Stalin era.Researchers have not ye raised the question of why this story was introduced by Stalin into the updated version of his own official biography only thirty years after the events described in it. Meanwhile, appealing to it makes it possible not only to comprehend the reasons and goals of mythologizing individual episodes of the leader’s biography at the culmination stage of building his cult, but also to study the methods and forms of using cultural tools to achieve such goals.The article focuses mainly on visual representations of the mythological story. However, it was important not only to analyze and classify the new unstudied iconographic schemes that had never been studied by anyone before, but also to see them in a historical and cultural context. This approach made it possible to demonstrate how the Soviet representation strategies had been “working” under the conditions of the permanent expansion of the leader’s “life story”, as well as how the universally proclaimed slogan about the immense veneration of the teacher Lenin by his student Stalin had been adjusted over time. The fact that the story of “Stalin in Razliv” had remained for a long time beyond the attention of the leader himself and the ideologists of his cult (i.e. it had been considered unworthy of special efforts) and was included in his biography only seven years before his death, makes the analysis proposed in the article even more comprehensive.


2019 ◽  
Vol 08 (01) ◽  
pp. e8-e10
Author(s):  
Jerry Easo ◽  
Malte Book ◽  
Samer Hakmi ◽  
Alexander Weymann

Background Necessity for lead removal in this case was after 12 years due to mitral valve regurgitation caused by retraction of the posterior leaflet by the inadvertently misplaced lead. Case Description This history describes a 45-year-old woman with history of multiple cardiac operations at young age with an abandoned defibrillator lead via a patent atrial septal defect. Lead extraction was performed with first described use of rotational dilating sheaths to reduce emboli risk, hoping to avoid a fourth surgical procedure with high risk. Conclusions Percutaneous lead removal using rotational sheaths is possible even for misplaced leads after long-time intervals with acceptable operative risk.


2011 ◽  
Vol 278 (1720) ◽  
pp. 3003-3008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Leslie

Conifers are an excellent group in which to explore how changing ecological interactions may have influenced the allocation of reproductive tissues in seed plants over long time scales, because of their extensive fossil record and their important role in terrestrial ecosystems since the Palaeozoic. Measurements of individual conifer pollen-producing and seed-producing cones from the Pennsylvanian to the Recent show that the relative amount of tissue invested in pollen cones has remained constant through time, while seed cones show a sharp increase in proportional tissue investment in the Jurassic that has continued to intensify to the present day. Since seed size in conifers has remained similar through time, this increase reflects greater investment in protective cone tissues such as robust, tightly packed scales. This shift in morphology and tissue allocation is broadly concurrent with the appearance of new vertebrate groups capable of browsing in tree canopies, as well as a diversification of insect-feeding strategies, suggesting that an important change in plant–animal interactions occurred over the Mesozoic that favoured an increase in seed cone protective tissues.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-436
Author(s):  
Kyle Conway

Recent debates about hospitality and religious diversity frequently hinge on unspoken notions of home. This is especially true in the Canadian province of Quebec, where citizens have worked to establish a secular state after a history of domination by the Catholic Church. In the last two decades, as religious minorities have grown, controversy has arisen about requests for accommodations made on religious grounds. Here I examine responses to those requests and ask what notions of home underpin them. One is grounded in history: its adherents contend that immigrants are guests and should conform to the norms of their new home. It expands the geography of home by linking secularism to collective identity. A second is grounded in political-legal thought: its adherents contend citizens are at home even if their views differ from the majority’s. It recognizes that long-time residents and newcomers mutually influence each other and, over time, people’s identities change.


2002 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 375-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geerat J. Vermeij

Three properties of predation make this form of consumption an important agency of evolution: universality (all species have predators), high frequency (encounters of prey with predators test both parties often), and imperfection (many predatory attacks fail, enabling antipredatory selection to take place). On long time scales, predators have two principal effects: they influence their victims' phenotypes, and prey species that are highly vulnerable to all phases of predatory attacks are evolutionarily restricted to environments where predators are rarely encountered. Although predator and prey can affect each other's behavior and morphology on timescales commensurate with individual lifespans, predators have the evolutionary upper hand over the long run, especially in the expression of sensory capacities, locomotor performance, and the application of force. Only in passive defenses (armor, toxicity, large body size) does escalation favor the prey. In a review of methods for inferring predation in the geological past, I argue against the use of whole assemblages, which combine species of contrasting adaptive type, Instead, I strongly favor species-level and clade-level approaches (including examples of clade replacement) in which comparisons among places and among time intervals are made within the same adaptive types and the same physical environments. The available evidence, much of which comes from studies of shell drilling and shell breakage, points to temporal increases in both predator power and prey defenses. Escalation between species and their enemies, including predators, has proceeded episodically against a backdrop of generally increasing productivity and increasing top-down evolutionary control by high-energy predators during the Phanerozoic, the consumer age.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Tatiana S. Minaeva ◽  
Sergey S. Gulyaev

Introduction. The organization of transport links and the bridge building in cities located on the banks of wide rivers has always been one of the most important tasks of the local administration. The study of the history of bridge building allows not only to trace the process of modernization of different regions of the country, but also to help in solving similar problems of our time. Nevertheless, the history of Russian bridge building is poorly studied. The purpose of the article is to determine the characteristics and features of the organization of bridge building in big cities of the European North of Russia as a way to solve one of the problems of urban infrastructure in the early XX century. Materials and Methods. The sources for this study are the documents of the State archive of the Arkhangelsk region, published documents on the history of Vologda, articles in the local periodicals of the early XX century. The analysis of the studied problem used a systematic approach, the method of economic analysis, historical and historical-comparative methods. Results and Discussion. The building of permanent bridges was a need for the development of Arkhangelsk and Vologda. In Vologda the two wooden bridges were built in the middle of XIX century on city funds and in the future these bridges were repaired or rebuilt. The Arkhangelsk city authorities did not hurry to solve a problem of city infrastructure by own efforts and a long time they used the floating bridge. The lack of experience in the building of large bridges and the desire to save money led to the rapid destruction of the first permanent bridge in Arkhangelsk. Conclusion. The Development of trade and industry in cities of the European North of Russia, such as Arkhangelsk and Vologda, led to the expansion of their territory and the emergence over time, the so-called third parts of the cities. Despite the comparable size of the population of the districts located across the river, the process of connecting them with bridges to the rest of the city went at different rates, which depended on the attitude of the local administration to the problem of urban infrastructure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
Sindorela Doli Kryeziu

Abstract In our paper we will talk about the whole process of standardization of the Albanian language, where it has gone through a long historical route, for almost a century.When talking about standard Albanian language history and according to Albanian language literature, it is often thought that the Albanian language was standardized in the Albanian Language Orthography Congress, held in Tirana in 1972, or after the publication of the Orthographic Rules (which was a project at that time) of 1967 and the decisions of the Linguistic Conference, a conference of great importance that took place in Pristina, in 1968. All of these have influenced chronologically during a very difficult historical journey, until the standardization of the Albanian language.Considering a slightly wider and more complex view than what is often presented in Albanian language literature, we will try to describe the path (history) of the standard Albanian formation under the influence of many historical, political, social and cultural factors that are known in the history of the Albanian people. These factors have contributed to the formation of a common state, which would have, over time, a common standard language.It is fair to think that "all activity in the development of writing and the Albanian language, in the field of standardization and linguistic planning, should be seen as a single unit of Albanian culture, of course with frequent manifestations of specific polycentric organization, either because of divisions within the cultural body itself, or because of the external imposition"(Rexhep Ismajli," In Language and for Language ", Dukagjini, Peja, 1998, pp. 15-18.)


Author(s):  
مها بنت منصور الصائغ

شهد تاريخ الأمة الإسلامية حضارة ونهضة عالمية في جميع مجالات الحياة الإنسانية، ومما كان له كبير الأثر في ذلك هو الأوقاف التي بدأت مع سيد البشرية محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم واستمرت بتنوع وشمولية إلى عصرنا الحالي؛ ولكن ما تعرضت إليه الأوقاف من إهمال وإقصاء وضياع يرجع لأسباب عديدة من أهمها غياب التوثيق الوقفي. تقوم الدراسة على تتبع مفهوم الوقف والتوثيق، والوقف في الإمارات العربية المتحدة ول سيما في إمارة الشارقة. توصلت الدراسة إلى نتائج منها: أن الأوقاف قائمة منذ زمن بعيد، وأن رغبة الواقف بالوقف وإقدامه عليها لم ينقصها سوى وثيقة، وأنه لا وثائق لها ولا مستندات، كما أن العرض الموجز لنشأة دائرة الأوقاف بالشارقة وسعيها لإحياء سنة الوقف ونشر ثقافته نراه يتضح شيئاً فشيئاً من خلال تفعيل مواد القانون والبحث حول الأنسب والأصح لحماية الأوقاف، ولم يكن هذا الاهتمام بالوقف إلا انعكاساً لتوجه الواقفين وتماشياً لرؤية الحكام وامتثالاً لنهج خير الأنام ورغبة في تكافل الأرواح وحباً للسلام. الكلمات المفتاحيّة: الوقف، التوثيق، المقارنة، الشارقة. Abstract The history of Islamic nation has witnessed a global civilization and it has had a great impact in all areas of human life, including the endowments that began with the master of humankind; Muhammad S.A.W. and it was continuing in diversity and comprehensively until our epoch. However, there are some problems related to endowment management such as negligence, exclusion and loss that due to many reasons. Among the most important reasons is the absence of endowment documentations. Therefore, the study aims to discuss the concept of endowment and documentation, as well as the endowment in United Arabic Emirates, especially in the Emirate of Sharjah. The study concluded that the practice of endowment has been existed for a long time, yet there are in need of endowment documentations. This study also found that the information related to the establishment of institution of endowment in Sharjah and its role has   spread widely to the people through the enforcement of the law and the implementation of the research related to the practice of endowment in order to sustain them in a good way. This documentation system was only a reflection of what has  stated in Shariah laws regarding the practice of endowment among the donors, so that it will be in line with the approach of good intentions and love of peace. Keywords: Endowment, Documentation, Comparison, Sharjah.   


Author(s):  
Ж.В. Васильева

вопросы взаимодействия моды и сферы искусства, аспекты сближения их позиций в области репрезентации базовых эстетических установок конца XIX – начала XX вв. долгое время оставались вне поля исследовательского внимания культурологов и искусствоведов. Между тем, для преподавания курса мировой художественной культуры (МХК) анализ динамики взаимопроникновения моды и искусства в период модерна, выявление параллелей в развитии фэшн-трендов и художественных направлений конца XIX – начала ХХ в. имеет принципиальное значение. Обосновать необходимость включения учебного материала по вестиментарным фэшн-трендам в курс МХК – наша задача. questions of interaction between fashion and art, aspects of convergence of their positions in the field of representation of basic aesthetic attitudes of the late XIX – early XX centuries for a long time remained out of the field of attention of researchers. Meanwhile, for teaching the history of world culture, the analysis of the dynamics of the interpenetration of fashion and art in the modern period, the identification of parallels in the development of fashion trends and artistic trends of the late XIX – early XX century is of fundamental importance. Our task is to justify the need to include educational material on vestigial fashion trends in the course of world art culture.


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