Two new specimens of Periastron reticulatum Unger emend. Beck have been collected from the Erin Slate, Talladega Slate Belt, southern Appalachians. Preserved anatomical features provide a basis for an expanded understanding of the genus and provide a biostratigraphic basis for dating the uppermost unit of the Talladega Slate Belt.

The tooth enamel of the earliest cetacean, Pakicetus, is described and compared to enamel of a primitive artiodactyl and a variety of primitive ungulate families. Pakicetus enamel organization, which is considered primitive for Cetacea, consists of a combination of radial and decussating enamel types. Prism patterns include prisms with open (horseshoe-shaped) and closed (circular) boundaries. Pakicetus enamel is similar to that of many primitive ungulates, including Diacodexis, the earliest artiodactyl, and Mesonychidae, an archaic ungulate family that often is considered close to the ancestry of Cetacea. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis, originally proposed on the basis of other aspects of morphology, that artiodactyls, cetaceans, and Mesonychidae are closely related.

A branched, scratch-ornamented burrow system is described from early Pleistocene sediments of Sicily, Italy. The trace fossil occurs in a bed of volcanic ash beneath a shallow marine silty unit and is remarkable in possessing enlarged, ovoid chambers above the multiple branching points of a maze. The structure, named Spongeliomorpha sicula, was probably produced by crustaceans. A likely interpretion is as an agrichnion, in which microbial gardening took place in the chambers.

Upper cretaceous strata of the U. S. Gulf Coastal Plain are rich in species and numbers of Exogyra, which occurs in a wide range of facies including siliciclastics, marls, and chalks. Specimens of Exogyra belonging to numerous well-defined species are also common to abundant locally in Upper Cretaceous siliciclastic rocks at many localities within the U. S. Western Interior, but the genus is exceedingly sparse in marly and chalky rocks of the same region. Intensive collecting in the chalky outcrops of western Kansas has yielded only two specimens of Exogyra, which are notable not only for good shell preservation but also for uniqueness of their respective occurrence. One of these specimens was collected from the Smoky Hill Chalk Member, Niobrara Chalk (Figure 1), and the other was collected from the Fairport Member, Carlile Shale (Figure 1). Principal paleontological works that treat the Niobrara fauna, especially including those of Meek (1876), Stanton (1893), Logan (1898), Scott and Cobban (1964), Miller (1968), and Hattin (1982), make no mention of the genus in that formation. Hattin (1962) documented a lone occurrence of Exogyra in the Fairport Member of Kansas, and sparse occurrence of E. cf. E. suborbiculata Lamarck in the Fairport was recorded by Kauffman (1961), whose material was collected in Huerfano Park, Colorado, where the member is calcareous or marly shale. Stratigraphic occurrence of the two Kansas specimens is presented in Figure 1, which also depicts ranges of other Exogyra species that have been recorded in the Upper Cretaceous of western Kansas.

A new genus and species of deer, Lucentia iberica, is described from the lower Turolian (MN 11) locality of Crevillente 2 (Alicante province, Spain). Eostyloceros pierensis Thomas, 1951 from Piera (Barcelona province) is also included in the new genus. The two-tined Lucentia is not a representative of Muntiacinae. From the emplacement on the cranial cavity and moderate backward inclination of the pedicles, and from the monopodial construction of the antlers, Lucentia is probably the sister group of the clade Cervinae + Odocoileinae. The hypothesis that Lucentia is most closely related to Cervinae is poorly supported by dental features. The Cervinae-Odocoileinae split must have occurred during the late Miocene and it being later, during the Pliocene, when the different lineages acquired the lateral metacarpal reduction, either plesiometacarpal or telemetacarpal states.

Early Permian massive corals define a narrow zone (the Thysanophyllum coral belt of Stevens, 1982) that surrounded the northern and western margins of Pangaea from the southern Ural Mountains through western North America to Bolivia (Stevens, 1982; Wilson, 1990). This belt appears to have been essentially continuous in the Wolfcampian, and although massive corals persisted along this belt into the Leonardian, they were restricted to many fewer localities.

The fauna of the lower Chickabally Member of the Budden Canyon Formation, a part of the Cretaceous Great Valley Sequence in the Cottonwood District (Figures 1, 2) of northern California, was described by Murphy (1975). At that time, two specimens of the species described here were known, but they were not complete enough to be identified or classified. Recently, Embree collected three additional specimens from the same horizon that enable us to classify the taxon with the Heteroceratidae. However, the rate of whorl expansion of the cross section of the conch and the open coiling are different from all other Heteroceratidae and we regard it, like much of the associated fauna, as a genus and species endemic to California.