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Two odd ones: Mediterranean ballast stones and Italian maritime connections in the medieval Bruges’ harbor system.
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Excavations in the Bruges’ Medieval outer ports of Hoeke and Monnikerede, located along the Zwin tidal inlet, revealed numerous rounded cobbles of exotic geological provenance among which were two specimens of remarkable mineralogical composition. An interdisciplinary study combining archeological, geological, petrographic-geochemical, and historical research has demonstrated their Mediterranean, i.e., Italian, provenance. A first stone is identified as Carrara marble originating from the alluvial fans of the Apuan Alps, deposited along the Versilian coast near the Renaissance towns of Lucca, Pisa, and Genoa. The second cobble is determined as a bioclastic calcarenite limestone from the Apulian shores. Both finds are interpreted as part of the non-saleable ballast once put in the holds of Italian carracks and galleys that touched the Flemish ports during the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. As such, both seemingly ordinary objects constitute a rare material and lithological testimony of an important late Medieval commercial network between the Mediterranean and North Sea coasts. Furthermore, the very rare occurrence of these Mediterranean cobbles compared to thousands of Scando-Baltic and Anglo-Scottish ballast stones in the whole of the Bruges outer harbor area can be related to differences in maritime traffic frequency and sheer commercial volumes. Also, the nature of the ballast itself and the ballasting procedures are important, the whole making Mediterranean ballast stones considerably less detectable in the Bruges’ harbors than their North-European equivalents.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
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Two remarkable new gastropods (Muricidae: Muricinae) from the Mascarene Plateau, Indian Ocean
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RBINS Staff Publications
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Type material of Clausiliidae door snails from Philippe Dautzenberg in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
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RBINS Staff Publications 2020
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Type material of South-American land snails (Mollusca: Gastropoda) of Wladyslaw Emanuel Lubomirski collection deposited in the Museum and Institute of zoology, Warsaw, Poland
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
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TYPE-MAASTRICHTIAN GASTROPOD FAUNAS SHOW RAPID ECOSYSTEM RECOVERY FOLLOWING THE CRETACEOUS–PALAEOGENE BOUNDARY CATASTROPHE
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The study of the global mass extinction event at the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K/Pg) boundary can aid in understanding patterns of selective extinction, and survival and dynamics of ecosystem recovery. Outcrops in the Maastrichtian type area (south-east Netherlands, north-east Belgium) comprise a stratigraphically expanded K/Pg boundary succession that offers a unique opportunity to study marine ecosystem recovery within the first few thousand years following the mass extinction event. A quantitative analysis was performed on systematically sampled macrofossils of the topmost Maastrichtian and lowermost Danian strata at the former Ankerpoort-Curfs quarry (Geulhem), which represent ‘snapshots’ of the latest Cretaceous and earliest Palaeogene marine ecosystems, respectively. Molluscs in particular are diverse and abundant in the studied succession. Regional ecosystem changes across the K/Pg boundary are relatively minor, showing a decline in suspension feeders, accompanied by an ecological shift to endobenthic molluscs. The earliest Paleocene gastropod assemblage retains many ‘Maastrichtian’ features and documents a fauna that temporarily survived into the Danian. The shallow, oligotrophic carbonate platform in this area was inhabited by taxa that were adapted to low nutrient levels and resistant to starvation. As a result, the local taxa were less affected by the short-lived detrimental conditions related to K/Pg boundary perturbations, such as darkness, cooling, starvation and ocean acidification. This resulted in relatively high survival rates, which enabled rapid recolonization and recovery of marine faunas in the Maastrichtian type area
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RBINS Staff Publications 2019
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Typological, technological and functional analyses of Mousterian points.
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Spy cave provided the most important number of Mousterian points in Belgium. Most of them were found in the “second fauna-bearing level” (De Puydt & Lohest, 1887) and are stored at the Grand Curtius Museum in Liège (De Puydt collection). They revealed morphological particularities and a remarkable similarity that encouraged a more detailed techno-morpho-functional analysis. Their good state of preservation allowed us to observe macro-traces and sometimes microwear polishes
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RBINS Staff Publications
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Typpe material of taxa described by Cousin and Jousseaume in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels
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RBINS Staff Publications 2020
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Ultraconserved elements-based phylogenomic systematics of the snake superfamily Elapoidea, with the description of a new Afro-Asian family
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The highly diverse snake superfamily Elapoidea is considered to be a classic example of ancient, rapid radiation. Such radiations are challenging to fully resolve phylogenetically, with the highly diverse Elapoidea a case in point. Previous attempts at inferring a phylogeny of elapoids produced highly incongruent estimates of their evolutionary relationships, often with very low statistical support. We sought to resolve this situation by sequencing over 4,500 ultraconserved element loci from multiple representatives of every elapoid family/subfamily level taxon and inferring their phylogenetic relationships with multiple methods. Concatenation and multispecies coalescent based species trees yielded largely congruent and well-supported topologies. Hypotheses of a hard polytomy were not retained for any deep branches. Our phylogenies recovered Cyclocoridae and Elapidae as diverging early within Elapoidea. The Afro-Malagasy radiation of elapoid snakes, classified as multiple subfamilies of an inclusive Lamprophiidae by some earlier authors, was found to be monophyletic in all analyses. The genus Micrelaps was consistently recovered as sister to Lamprophiidae. We establish a new family, Micrelapidae fam. nov., for Micrelaps and assign Brachyophis to this family based on cranial osteological synapomorphy. We estimate that Elapoidea originated in the early Eocene and rapidly diversified into all the major lineages during this epoch. Ecological opportunities presented by the post-Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event may have promoted the explosive radiation of elapoid snakes.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2023
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Un acarien qui saute et qui se met en boule
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RBINS Staff Publications
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Un aperçu de la plaine côtière
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RBINS Staff Publications