Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage.

The Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Archipelago of Germany has yielded a pterosaur assemblage that has long underpinned and continues to dominate much of our understanding of these flying reptiles. Knowledge of how this assemblage was shaped by processes of fossilization, critical for generating robust paleobiological hypotheses, remains limited. Here, we combine fatal trauma case studies with quantitative taphonomic data to reveal two distinct fossilization pathways.

Ecological impact of the end-Cretaceous extinction on lamniform sharks.

Lamniform sharks are apex marine predators undergoing dramatic local and regional decline worldwide, with consequences for marine ecosystems that are difficult to predict. Through their long history, lamniform sharks have faced widespread extinction, and understanding those 'natural experiments' may help constrain predictions, placing the current crisis in evolutionary context. Here we show, using novel morphometric analyses of fossil shark teeth, that the end-Cretaceous extinction of many sharks had major ecological consequences.