Upper Ordovician Phacopida (Trilobita) from Tasmania

Eastonian trilobite faunas of the Gordon Group in Tasmania include the new species Ceraurinella oepiki, Erratencrinurus trippi, and Pliomerina trisulcata, as well as a reedocalymeninid probably allied to Sarrabesia Hammann & Leone, 1997. Ceraurinella and Erratencrinurus have not previously been reported from Australia, the former being predominantly Laurentian but also known from NE China, the Himalaya, and Vietnam, and the latter mostly Baltic/Laurentian. Peri-Gondwanan species of Ceraurinella appear to form a clade, within which Tasmanian and Indian (central Himalayan) taxa are closest relatives.     

The unbearable weight of music: The intermezzo

The affordances of musical experience, its capacity to become our mode of being-in-the-world, especially in ritual situations, can be turned against us into an aversive sonic attack that bends the social arc into a liminality without end, a time in between that goes nowhere. And when this happens, we have entered the realm of music torture, a relatively recent innovation in that dark art that was ushered into the world in full force at the beginning of the 21st century. Music became part of a regime of no-touch torture inflicted upon detainees in the ‘global war on terror’, itself a war without end. In this article, the author argues for an ontomusicology that understands music as ritual and ritual as music – in this case, ritual that inverts Victor Turner’s notion of communitas, with all of its attendant modes of being-with, into a solitary mode of existence with no hope of escape, a musical ritual torture, a perpetual intermezzo.     

A new temnospondyl amphibian from the Lower Triassic of South America

A new temnospondyl from the Early Triassic Buena Vista Formation (Paraná Basin) in Uruguay is described. The specimen is represented by a skull table fragment which includes the left orbit, and, although fairly incomplete, shows close affinities with the basal temnospondyl clade (Dvinosaurus + Tupilakosauridae). Previously, members of this clade were only known from Upper Permian and Lower Triassic deposits from the Northern Hemisphere. The new specimen described herein together with a recent record from the Lower Triassic of South Africa (Karoo Basin), support the hypothesis of an invasion of members of the basal (Dvinosaurus + Tupilakosauridae) clade into Gondwana as early as the Late Permian.     

Paracordyline aureonemoralis (Lomandraceae): an Eocene monocotyledon from South Australia

A monocotyledonous leaf macrofossil taxon from Golden Grove in Adelaide, South Australia is recognised as being close to several extant Australasian species of Cordyline, especially those in the C. stricta (Sims) Endl. / C. fruticosa (L.) A. Chev. complex. The fossil is assigned to the form genus Paracordyline, known previously from the Oligocene Kerguélen Islands. However, as the Golden Grove taxon differs markedly from the Kerguélen species, it is considered to be a new species, P. aureonemoralis Conran & Christophel.