This book provides the first comprehensive overview of current research on Australian Mesozoic faunas and floras, with a balanced coverage of the many technical papers, conference abstracts and unpublished material housed in current collections. Robert J Hamilton-Bruce, South Australian Museum in Adelaide.

This volume focuses on the broad pattern of increasing biodiversity through time, and recurrent events of minor and major ecosphere reorganization. Intense scrutiny is devoted to the pattern of physical (including isotopic), sedimentary and biotic circumstances through the time intervals during which life crises occurred. These events affected terrestrial, lacustrine and estuarine ecosystems, locally and globally, but have affected continental shelf ecosystems and even deep ocean ecosystems. The pattern of these events is the backdrop against which modelling the pattern of future environmental change needs to be evaluated.

Concern about the effects of global change on our planet's future has driven much research into the last few thousand years of earth history. In contrast, this volume takes a much longer viewpoint to provide a historical perspective to recent and future global change. Over 40 international specialists investigate the reaction of life to global environmental changes, from Cretaceous times to the turn of the century. During this time earth's climate has changed from a very warm, 'greenhouse' phase with no significant ice sheets to today's 'ice-house' world. A wide spectrum of animal, plant and protistan life is discussed, encompassing terrestrial, shallow-marine and deep-marine realms. Each chapter considers a particular taxonomic group, looking first at the general picture and then focusing on more specialized aspects such as extinctions, diversity and biogeography. This volume will form an invaluable reference for researchers and graduate students in paleontology, geology, biology, oceanography and climatology.

This book gives a new global perspective on the Phanerozoic timescale, by bringing together extensive Australian and overseas research on biostratigraphy, geochronology, and magnetostratigraphy. For the first time, correlations are established between Australian and European biozonal schemes for the entire Phanerozoic, by integrating local and international biozones, isotopic ages, and magnetic polarity intervals. Tie points are based on tightly constrained isotopic and biostrastigraphic ages, and this is the first compilation for the whole of the Phanerozoic to apply results from the latest isotopic dating techniques, including the high resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) and variants of the (superscript 40)Ar/(superscript 39)Ar method. These have radically rescaled some parts of the geological column. An Australian Phanerozoic Timescale gives the essential framework for resource exploration, geologic modelling, and reconstruction of past environments and land-sea configurations during the last 545 million years of earth history.