Contact relations and petrography of the volcanic breccia known as the Stac Fada Member, near Stoer, show that it is not a simple sediment-gravity flow, but was generated lower in the sedimentary succession by phreatomagmatic activity and rose to the surface as buoyant peperitic slurry. A previously undescribed part of the member, 9 m below the intrusive base of the main ‘flow’, has an intrusive top. Vesicle trains within the breccia matrix suggest that the slurry was boiling at a temperature of at least 160°C.

The Lower Carboniferous of northern Britain is dominated by non-marine sequences which yield fish and crustacean faunas. These are rarely preserved and occur in thin layers. The sedimentology of twelve shrimp-bearing localities is described, in most cases for the first time, to shed light upon the habitats occupied by eumalacostracan crustaceans during their early Carboniferous adaptive radiation. Nearly all these sequences were deposited in coastal delta-plain settings or in interdistributary bays, environments of transitional salinity. The Gullane shrimp bed, however, was laid down in a thermally stratified non-marine lake, and its sole crustacean representative, Tealliocaris, seems to have been generally confined to waters of low salinity. None of the shrimp-beds was deposited in a fully marine environment, though most show evidence of at least some marine influence. Crustacean diversity increases with salinity, and the lack of shrimps in fully marine sediments is largely due to taphonomic factors rather than an environmental control.

Recent river erosion of three coalescing debris cones in Glen Feshie has exposed a complex sequence of debris flow units. Radiocarbon dating of organic matter from interbedded buried soils reveals that the soil at the base of the sequence was buried at c. 2000 yr BP, but that the bulk of the cones accumulated since the fifteenth century AD. The episodic nature of cone development is attributable to lateral migration of the River Feshie, with periods of cone accumulation when the river occupied the far side of its floodplain alternating with periods of erosion when the river impinged on the cones. There is no evidence to suggest that recent cone accumulation is related to anthropogenic vegetation disturbance, but phases of cone accumulation show a broad temporal correspondence with periods of Late Holocene climatic deterioration. The cones are essentially paraglacial in that their continuing accumulation depends on a supply of sediment derived from glacial and periglacial deposits upslope. The form of debris-flow units indicates that flows at this site were less viscous than most ‘hillslope’ flows, and cone volumes indicate an average annual accumulation of c. 50–60 m3 of sediment over the past c. 300years.

Forty-one species assigned to thirty-seven named genera of trilobites are described from the Tangtou Formation at Tangshan and Lunshan, in Jiangsu Province, SE China. Nankinolithus nankinensis Lu, the Zone fossil of the upper part of the Formation, is abundant. Many Tangtou Formation species occur also in the Huangnehkan, Linhsiang and Chiencaokou formations, and all are considered to be of early Ashgill age. The trilobites are closely related to those of the Staurocephalus clavifrons Zone (Rawtheyan) of Poland, demonstrating the long duration and wide extent of deeper water faunas. There are also close links with the Ashgill faunas of Central Asia.

One new species, Amphitryon cheni, is established. The following morphological features are described: a small remopleuridine hypostome is unlike any other in construction; Nileus transversus retains genal spines to full grown size in some specimens, but loses them in others; the hypostome lacks the posteromedian cusp of other species. The hypostome of Paraphillipsinella is strongly styginid in conformation, and unlike that of Phillipsinella. Telephina convexa is the only species known with three spines on the librigena. The arrangement of pits in Nankinolithus nankinensis, the type species, is described, including illustrations of the irregularities which occur in every fringe. A small bulb at the tip of the hypostome of Ovalocephalus (= Hammatocnemis) bears two backwardly pointing spinules, one above the other, on the vertical posterior margin. Three types of protaspides, and numerous meraspid parts are described.

In this paper, on page 375, we published an Arenig palaeogeography in Figure 6 which showed the subduction zone off Laurentia as dipping northwards. This was a drafting error. The subduction zone should have dipped southward away from Laurentia. We apologise for this error and publish here a revised Figure 6 for the Arenig.