Fossils at a Glance ebook is available to be downloaded here now.
- Title: Fossils at a Glance
- Author: Clare Milsom, Sue Rigby
- Publisher: Wiley – Blackwell
- Pages: 171
The Earth is the only planet we know to support life. Its long history shows that life and the planet it inhabits have a complicated relationship. Free oxygen in the atmosphere, the ozone shield, the movement of carbon into long-term reservoirs in the deep oceans, and the rapid weathering of rocks on the land surface are obvious examples of this relationship.
The evolutionary history of life on Earth points to the development of a series of faunas that occupied the changing surfaces of the land and sea. Through the extraordinary medium of lagerstätten, or sites of exceptional preservation, it is possible to visualize these vanished communities and to restore some of their behaviors and interactions.
In addition, the process of evolution, via Darwinian natural selection, is recorded in the fossil record. Though incomplete and tantalizing in places, fossils are the only direct information source about the nature of our ancestors, and the ancestors of any life on modern Earth.
The study of fossils offers a view of the past at all scales of space and time. From a single moment, for example the single act of making a footprint, to the study of the evolution of tetrapods, or from the study of a single locality to an analysis of the effect of the break-up of Pangea on the evolution of dinosaurs, the fossil record is the primary source of data. Paleontologists build detailed interpretations and analysis from the study of individual fossils; most are invertebrate animals, preserved in great abundance in the shallow marine record.
In this book, we provide an introduction to the methods by which fossils are studied. We discuss the biases that follow from the process of fossilization, and explain how this can be analyzed for a particular fossil locality. We provide an introduction to evolutionary theory, which is the basis for explaining the consistent changes of shape seen in fossils over time.