Yolanda M. Aguilar

The region with the highest marine biodiversity on our planet is known as the Coral Triangle or Indo-Australian Archipelago (IAA)1,2. Its enormous biodiversity has long attracted the interest of biologists; however, the detailed evolutionary history of the IAA biodiversity hotspot remains poorly understood³. Here we present a high-resolution recons...

A new species of the genus Wareniconcha, W. mercenarioides, belonging to the chemosymbiotic bivalve subfamily Pliocardiinae (family Vesicomyidae), is described from a Pliocene methane-seep deposit at Liog-Liog on Leyte Island, Philippines. With a length of almost 12 cm, this species is significantly larger than the six extant species currently cons...

AimCenozoic dynamics of large-scale species diversity patterns remain poorly understood, especially for the Western Pacific, in part, because of the paucity of well-dated fossil records from the tropics. This article aims to reveal the spatiotemporal dynamics of species diversity in the Western Pacific through the Cenozoic, focusing on the tropical...

Based upon large cerithiform gastropod specimens from the middle Miocene beds of Java, Indonesia and the Philippines, a new genus and new species, Megistocerithium magoi, is described herein. Ten fragmentary specimens from the lower and upper Miocene beds of the Philippines are tentatively referred to this species. M. magoi Kase sp. nov. is amongst...

A new polyconitid rudist, Magallanesia canaliculata gen. et sp. nov., of probably late Albian age, is described from the Pulangbato area, central Cebu Island, the Philippines in the western Central Pacific and Takuyo-Daini Seamount, now located in the Northwest Pacific. It is similar to Praecaprotina Yabe and Nagao, 1926, a Japanese–Central Pacific...

Calyptraphorus is a distinctive stromboidean gastropod genus with its earliest fossil record from the Campanian (Cretaceous). The genus survived the K-Pg biotic crisis and was thought to have become extinct before the end of the Eocene. Calyptraphorus sp. is described on the basis of a single specimen recovered from the mid-Pliocene Tartaro Formati...

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system during the Pliocene warm period (PWP; 3-5 million years ago) may have existed in a permanent El Niño state with a sharply reduced zonal sea surface temperature (SST) gradient in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This suggests that during the PWP, when global mean temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide...

Color markings of the potamidid gastropods Vicarya yokoyamai Takeyama, 1933 and Vicarya verneuili (d’Archiac, 1851), tropical and subtropical, mangrove-swamp and/or nearby intertidal dwellers during the Miocene in Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Korea and Japan, have been reconstructed. This reconstruction was based on preserved original color markings a...

A chambered nautilus shell from the early Pleistocene deep-water sediments in the Bolinao area of Pangasinan province, northwestern Luzon, Philippines is described. Although the shell is fragmentary, the shell features indicate that the specimen is referable with reservation to the extant Nautilus pompilius Linnaeus, 1758. This finding represents t...

We report briefly the fossilized chemosynthetic molluscan assemblages found along the coastal area of Tabango and Villaba municipalities, northwestern Leyte, Philippines. This is the first discovery of fossil cold-seep assemblages in Southeast Asia. The geology of the study area is tentatively divided here into four formations ; namely, Formations...