Palaeontology category: 374 books

Fossils are essential to the reconstruction of the evolution of life and episodes in Earth history. Knowledge of biomineralization - the processes associated with the formation of mineralized biological structures - is essential to properly evaluate data derived from fossils. This book emphasizes...

A small set of fossilized bones discovered almost thirty years ago led paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee on a lifelong quest to understand their place in our understanding of the history of life. They were clearly the bones of something unusual, a bird-like creature that lived long, long ago in the...

The Cambrian is our origination story; the species fossilized in the rocks are our "founding fathers." We can follow their story (and ours) through more than half a billion years of time.

What began as a hunting trip to British Columbia’s Northern Rockies in 2000 turns into one of the province’s most important fossil finds – the Monroe Dinosaur Trackway in Kakwa Provincial Park. In Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils, Vivien Lougheed tells the fascinating tale of the...

Fossil Mammals of Asia, edited by and with contributions from world-renowned scholars, is the first major work devoted to the late Cenozoic (Neogene) mammalian biostratigraphy and geochronology of Asia. This volume employs cutting-edge biostratigraphic and geochemical dating methods to map the emergence...

This book is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered review of China's vertebrate fossil record. It also presents a history of vertebrate paleontological studies in China and an entrée to some important issues of systematics, evolutionary history, paleoecology, taphonomy, and functional anatomy best elucidated by China's fossils.

What can we learn about the evolution of jaws from a pair of scissors? How does the flight of a tennis ball help explain how fish overcome drag? What do a spacesuit and a chicken egg have in common? Highlighting the fascinating twists and turns of evolution across more than 540 million years, paleobiologist...

This volume arises from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on 'North African Cretaceous rudist and coral formations and their contributions to carbonate platform development , which was held in Tunisia, on 13-18 May, 2002. It was convened by M. El Hedi Negra (Universite 7 Novembre de Carthage,...

One of the most important questions we can ask about life is "Does ecology matter?" Most biologists and paleontologists are trained to answer "yes," but the exact mechanisms by which ecology matters in the context of patterns that play out over millions of years have never been...

The fossil record contains unique long-term insights into how ecosystems form and function which cannot be determined simply by examining modern systems. It also provides a record of endangered species through time, which allow us to make conservation decisions based on thousands to millions of years...

L'era Mesozoica o Secondaria, si estende per un periodo che va da 251 a 65 milioni di anni fa. Denominata anche come Età dei Rettili, deriva il nome dal greco mesos, "medio", perché posta a cavallo tra l'era antica (paleozoica) e quella recente (cenozoica) dove si assistette ad una vera...

L’Era Paleozoica o Primaria abbraccia un lasso temporale che va da 542 milioni a 251 milioni di anni fa. Il nome Paleozoico ("vita antica"), così come quello di Era Primaria, deriva dal fatto che, in passato, essa era considerata la prima era geologica, coincidente con la comparsa dei...

Bringing together archaeological, paleoenvironmental, paleontological and genetic data, this book makes a first attempt to reconstruct African population histories from out species' evolution to the Holocene. Africa during Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 6 to 2 (~190-12,000 years ago) witnessed the biological...