You can download Rereading the Fossil Record ebook here.
- Title: Rereading the Fossil Record – The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline
- Author: David Sepkoski
- Publisher: The Univercity of Chigago Press
- Pages: 442
When Stephen Jay Gould was fi ve years old, his father took him to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to see the institution’s great collection of dinosaurs. Gould later recalled that as he stood in front of the Tyrannosaurus, “a man sneezed; I gulped and prepared to utter my Shema Yisrael. But the great animal stood immobile in all its bony grandeur, and as we left, I announced that I would be a paleontologist when I grew up” (Gould 1980d, 267). Gould did indeed grow up to be arguably the best known paleontologist in the world, but he never studied dinosaurs.
Rather, he focused his doctoral dissertation on Bermudian land snails, and he spent most of his scientific career investigating the dynamics of evolutionary change using abstract models, computer simulations, and theoretical generalizations. Gould did not simply become a paleontologist; he identified as a “paleobiologist,” a designation he helped popularize and establish as an important subfield of evolutionary biology. Gould’s career was a microcosm of an important change that took place during the second half of the 20th century, that transformed paleontology and infl uenced the way broad questions about the history of life were incorporated into the developing fi eld of evolutionary biology. This is a book about that transformation.
- List of content:
- Darwin’s Dilemma: Paleontology, the Fossil Record, and Evolutionary Theory
- The Growth of Theoretical Paleontology
- The Rise of Quantitative Paleobiology
- From Paleoecology to Paleobiology
- Punctuated Equilibria and the Rise of the New Paleobiology
- The Founding of a Research Journal
- “Towards a Nomothetic Paleontology”: The MBL Model and Stochastic Paleontology
- A “Natural History of Data”: The Rise of Taxic Paleobiology
- The Dynamics of Mass Extinctions
- Toward a New Macroevolutionary Synthesis