Oldest Australian vespertilionid (Microchiroptera) from the early Miocene of Riversleigh,Queensland

An upper molar of a small bat, here described from an early Miocene freshwater lime-stone deposit at Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland, is the oldest record in Australia of the microchiropteran family Vespertilionidae. The new taxon is referred to the cosmopolitan genus Leuconoe, but it does not appear to be closely related to the two extant Australian species of this genus.     

Expectation,motivation, engagement and ownership: using student reflections in the conative and affective domains to enhance residential field courses

Residential field courses are important and should be designed and delivered to maximize their value to students, staff and institutions. In this context, we use a novel approach involving analysis of the daily affective and conative reflections of students immersed in the field course experience to better understand student engagement with fieldwork. We show that students base their field course choice on a range of factors (costs and benefits) and that these choices subsequently influence student expectations and motivation to engage with fieldwork. We also show that the motivation of students to engage with fieldwork-based learning varies from person to person and from day to day. Our findings suggest that having a more nuanced understanding of the decisions students make when deciding which field course to enrol upon would enhance our ability to design attractive, accessible and useful field courses; that having an awareness of the expectations of students around field courses would enable us to better prepare them to undertake them; and that students are more motivated when they are afforded an opportunity to work independently and perceive themselves to have ownership of their learning.     

Recent Debates on the Fate of the German Population in Upper Silesia 1945-1950

This article presents an analysis of the Polish-German scholarlyand public debate of the last decades dedicated to the fateof the German population in Upper Silesia after the ending ofthe Second World War. In the introduction, three determiningfactors of the current discussion are mentioned: first, thepublic debate on this topic, which evolved especially afterthe turning point of the democratization in Poland in 1989,and which created a certain social climate for these scholarlydebates; secondly, the history of the Polish-German conflictin Upper Silesia, which conditioned the post-war situation inthe region; and thirdly, the main historiographical paradigmsto the subject before 1989 in both countries, whose fixationand whose deficits weighed heavily upon the research directionchosen in this period. From among these three aspects—the camps built for theGerman population, their resettlement, and the politics of nationalitytowards former German citizens, who were then recognized asowners of Polish nationality and who could remain in their homes—thearticle concentrates on the first one. The last few years sawthe most fundamental revision concerning the camps for the Germanpopulation, and our knowledge is here relatively complete. Itis worth underlining that most advances here have been achievedby Polish historians from various disciplinary directions.     

Pleistocene frogs from the Darling Downs,southeastern Queensland,and their palaeoenvironmental significance

Systematic collecting from fluvial late Pleistocene deposits from the Darling Downs, southeast Queensland, Australia, has led to the recovery of the first fossil frogs from the region, ail from the Myobatrachidae, a family of ground dwelling and burrowing frogs. The most common species recovered, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis, is extant on the Darling Downs. The fossil taxa include species whose extant populations inhabit arid zones(Limnodynastes sp. cf. L. spenceri), montane forests (Kyarranus spp.), and open woodlands (Neobatrachus sudelli), and indicate the existence of a mosaic of habitats during the Pleistocene. The absence of the Hylidae (tree frogs), a family common throughout the Darling Downs today, may be explained by a taphonomic bias that favours non-arboreal forms. Alternatively, hylids may have been rare or absent on the Darling Downs during the Pleistocene.