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Plant adaptations to environmental and climatic changes in Pangaean intramontane basins are poorly understood. Here, we document a previously unknown primitive gymnosperm species, Lesleya ceriacoi sp. nov., from the Douro Carboniferous Basin (DCB; lower Gzhelian, Upper Pennsylvanian; NW Portugal) of the Variscan Iberian Massif (Iberia). This new species is described from a 303 million-years-old fossil rediscovered at the U.Porto's Herbarium PO, stored at the Museu de História Natural e da Ciência da Universidade do Porto (MHNC-UP; Portugal). L. ceriacoi sp. nov. displays an exquisite leaf shape with morphological traits adapted to specific ecological conditions of the DCB. These leaf morphological traits comprise toothed and dissected margins, which represent specialised adaptations to drier (xerophytic) conditions of the DCB during the Gzhelian (ca. 304–299 Ma), at the end of the Late Pennsylvanian. The xeromorphic traits of the new species represent an evolutionary novelty for the Pennsylvanian Euramerican dry-climate adapted floras, and are evidence of evolutionary adaptation to environmental and climatic change in intramontane basins like DCB within central tropical Pangaea. Such an adaptation occurred during an interval of wet to dry climate transition after the end of one late Palaeozoic Gondwana Ice Age (glaciation) in Gzhelian time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late Early Pleistocene vertebrate assemblages in the Mediterranean area have sparked the interest of the scientific community in the last two decades mainly thanks to the discovery of fossils and/or stone tools testifying to the presence of early Homo. However, our knowledge of most of these assemblages is biased by the lack of well-constrained chronological data, especially for those close to or related to the Jaramillo magnetostratigraphic subchron (ca. 1.0 Ma). As a matter of fact, the available European palaeontological assemblages chronologically close to the Jaramillo interval are overall scarce, especially for the period prior to the so-called '0.9 Ma event'. This long and cold glacial period was characterised by profound changes in ecosystems and important faunal turnover in Europe, including the replacement of most Villafranchian species by typical Galerian ones. Here, we report on the carnivoran remains from Collecurti (central Italy), that is, one of the few available Jaramillo-dated assemblages in Europe. The Collecurti sample includes the species Canis (Xenocyon) lycaonoides, Canis mosbachensis, and Ursus deningeri and is here described in detail for the first time and compared with those from similar-aged European sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]