"Paleontology is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present)."
Study of fossils and their use in understanding the evolution of life on earth.
Geological time scale: An overview of the major geological periods and their subdivisions, providing a framework for understanding the age and evolution of rocks, fossils, and lifeforms.
Sedimentary rocks: The main type of rocks where fossils are usually found, including their formation and characteristic features such as stratification, bedding, and fossils.
Stratigraphy: The study of rock layers and their chronological relationships, including methods of correlation and dating such as biostratigraphy, radiometric dating, and paleomagnetism.
Fossil preservation: The different types of fossilization processes and their effects on the morphology and quality of fossils, such as molds, casts, permineralization, carbonization, and impressions.
Taxonomy and systematics: The classification and naming of organisms based on their morphological, anatomical, and genetic features, including the principles of nomenclature and cladistics.
Morphology: The study of the shape, structure, and function of organisms, including their bones, teeth, shells, and soft tissues, and how they relate to their ecology, behavior, and evolution.
Evolution: The theory of how organisms change over time through genetic variation, natural selection, and speciation, including the evidence from fossils, genetics, and comparative anatomy.
Paleobiology: The study of the biology and ecology of extinct organisms and their interactions with the environment, including topics like paleoecology, paleobiogeography, and taphonomy.
Paleoclimate: The study of the climate and environmental conditions of the past, including proxy data from fossils, sediments, ice cores, and other sources, and their relevance for understanding global change.
History of paleontology: The development of paleontology as a scientific discipline, including the key figures, discoveries, theories, and controversies that shaped its progress and impact on society.
Vertebrate Paleontology: Focuses on the study of fossils of vertebrates such as fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals.
Invertebrate Paleontology: Involves the study of fossils of organisms without a backbone such as mollusks, arthropods, and corals.
Micropaleontology: Deals with the study of fossils that are too small to be seen with the naked eye, such as single-celled organisms, pollen, and spores.
Paleobotany: Deals with the study of fossils of plants, including seeds, spores, leaves, stems, and wood.
Ichnology: Study of trace fossils and tracks of ancient organisms including footprints, burrows, and borings.
Taphonomy: Study of the processes that influence the preservation of biological remains, including fossilization, decay, and diagenesis.
Paleobiology: A multidisciplinary field that integrates paleontological data with information from genetics, physiology, ecology, and biogeography.
Biostratigraphy: A type of stratigraphy that uses fossils to determine the relative ages of rock layers.
Biogeography: Study of the distribution of plants and animals in space and time.
Evolutonary Paleontology: Focuses on the study of patterns and processes of evolution in the fossil record.
Paleomagnetism: Study of the Earth's magnetic history, including the orientation and movement of magnetic minerals in rocks and sediments.
Paleoceanography: Study of the history of the oceans, including their temperature, salinity, and circulation, based on the analysis of sediment cores and fossils such as foraminifera.
Paleoecology: Study of ancient environments, including the interactions between plants, animals, and their physical and biological surroundings.
Geobiology: A multidisciplinary field that combines paleontology, geology, biology, and chemistry to study the interactions between life and the Earth's environment.
Astrobiology: Study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe, including the search for extraterrestrial life.
"It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their paleoecology)."
"Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC."
"The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy."
"The term has been used since 1822 formed from Greek παλαιός ('palaios', 'old, ancient'), ὄν ('on', (gen. 'ontos'), 'being, creature'), and λόγος ('logos', 'speech, thought, study')."
"Paleontology lies on the border between biology and geology, but it differs from archaeology in that it excludes the study of anatomically modern humans."
"It now uses techniques drawn from a wide range of sciences, including biochemistry, mathematics, and engineering."
"As knowledge has increased, paleontology has developed specialized sub-divisions, some of which focus on different types of fossil organisms while others study ecology and environmental history, such as ancient climates."
"Body fossils and trace fossils are the principal types of evidence about ancient life."
"Geochemical evidence has helped to decipher the evolution of life before there were organisms large enough to leave body fossils."
"Estimating the dates of these remains is essential but difficult: sometimes adjacent rock layers allow radiometric dating, which provides absolute dates that are accurate to within 0.5%, but more often paleontologists have to rely on relative dating by solving the 'jigsaw puzzles' of biostratigraphy."
"Classifying ancient organisms is also difficult, as many do not fit well into the Linnaean taxonomy classifying living organisms, and paleontologists more often use cladistics to draw up evolutionary 'family trees'."
"The final quarter of the 20th century saw the development of molecular phylogenetics, which investigates how closely organisms are related by measuring the similarity of the DNA in their genomes."
"Molecular phylogenetics has also been used to estimate the dates when species diverged."
"But there is controversy about the reliability of the molecular clock on which such estimates depend."