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The simplest definition of "paleontology" is "the study of ancient life". [5] The field seeks information about several aspects of past organisms: "their identity and origin, their environment and evolution, and what they can tell us about the Earth's organic and inorganic past". [6]
Bust of the paleontologist Georges Cuvier (left) and a cast skeleton of Palaeotherium magnum (named by Cuvier in 1804, right), Cuvier Museum of Montbéliard. Paleontology (/ ˌ p eɪ l i ɒ n ˈ t ɒ l ə dʒ i, ˌ p æ l i-,-ən-/ PAY-lee-on-TOL-ə-jee, PAL-ee-, -ən-), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to the start of the ...
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
A skeleton in a bioarchaeology lab. Paleodemography studies demographic characteristics of past populations. [5] Bioarchaeologists use paleodemography to create life tables, a type of cohort analysis, to understand zdemographic characteristics (such as risk of death or sex ratio) of a given age cohort within a population.
Historical development [ edit ] During the 17th century, Nicolas Steno was the first to observe and propose a number of basic principles of historical geology, including three key stratigraphic principles: the law of superposition , the principle of original horizontality , and the principle of lateral continuity .
Hence, paleontology overlaps with geology (the study of rocks and rock formations) as well as with botany, biology, zoology and ecology – fields concerned with life forms and how they interact. The major subdivisions of paleontology include paleozoology (animals), paleobotany (plants) and micropaleontology (microfossils).
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence (such as petrified skeletal remains, bone fragments, footprints) and cultural ...
In archaeology and paleontology a faunal assemblage is a group of animal fossils found together in a given stratum. [1] In a non-deformed deposition, fossils are organized by stratum following the laws of uniformitarianism [2] and superposition, [3] which state that the natural phenomena observable today (such as death, decay, or post-mortem transport) also apply to the paleontological record ...