"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)."
The study of fossils and other evidence of past life, including human ancestors and extinct animals.
Evolution: The process by which different species of organisms develop and change over time.
Fossilization: The process by which organic materials are preserved in rocks, leading to the formation of fossils.
Rock types: The different types of rocks and how they affect the preservation of fossils.
Anatomy: Understanding of the anatomy of prehistoric lifeforms and how it differs from modern-day organisms.
Classification: The process of identifying and categorizing different types of prehistoric life based on their physical characteristics.
Geological time scale: The division of Earth's history into different time periods and how paleontologists use it to study prehistoric life.
Biogeography: The study of how organisms have moved and evolved over geographical regions over time.
Extinction: The process by which species die out, and the causes of past mass extinctions.
Paleoenvironments: The study of the ancient environments inhabited by prehistoric life and how they have changed over time.
Reconstruction: The process of creating models and depictions of prehistoric life based on fossil evidence and scientific knowledge.
Taphonomy: The study of how organisms become preserved as fossils and how this affects our understanding of prehistoric life.
Paleobotany and Palynology: The study of prehistoric plant life and pollen evidence.
Paleozoology: The study of prehistoric animal life.
Scientific methods: The rigorous scientific methods used in paleontological research and how to apply them to, for example, uncover new evidence.
Ethics: The ethical considerations around paleontological research, including questions of heritage, access to funding, scientific misconduct, and social responsibility.
"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."