Fossils by Thomson Keith;

Author:Thomson, Keith; [Thomson, Keith;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192805041
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2005-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Bringing fossils to life

Palaeontology is rarely a glamorous saga of digging up whole skeletons or entire communities preserved intact in a nice soft rock; most often it is hard graft – picking over thousands and thousands of fossil fragments in order to find tiny clues that can be assembled, often over years, into a coherent pattern. A great deal of the fascination of palaeontology therefore exists in the role of the scientist as detective. A palaeontologist works in a similar fashion to the familiar forensic scientist of detective fiction (and real life), teasing out the mysteries of a single life and a whole world from a few inanimate remains.

Palaeontology has several extraordinarily ambitious goals. Historically the first of these was to use fossils in the science of stratigraphy, and to discover and interpret the structure and history of the earth itself. Each layer (stratum) of the sedimentary parts of the earth’s crust has its own characteristic fossils, giving a clue to its age relative to other strata, and also the original environment. As the strata, through time, show different but obviously related faunas and floras, next came the second goal: to re-assemble an all-encompassing genealogy – the evolutionary inter-relationships – of fossil and living organisms, back to the origins of life itself. No palaeontologist would ever imagine that the resulting family tree could ever be complete. But every fossil that is found has the potential to add something to the evolutionary database. The third major task of palaeontology is more ambitious still: to understand what the fossil organisms were like in life – not just to identify them, but to reconstruct their appearance, their mechanical and physiological functions, their ecology, and even their behaviour.

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