11/12/2023 0 Comments Dinosaur sketch imagesPaleontologists provide us with a unique vantage on modern climate change. Alarmingly, the field is declining, just when we need it most. Knowing this history is critical to our response to just such challenges: climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinctions and other perils, mainly human-made, facing the biosphere and humanity. From its beginnings, more than three billion years ago, to the present day, fossils record how life adapted or perished in the face of major environmental challenges. Its real significance lies in how such discoveries illuminate the grand history of life on Earth. Learning this long-term historical perspective is as important as studying the gene and the cell.īut the headlines over exciting new fossils, especially new dinosaurs, grossly underestimate the true importance of paleontology. At a time when instruction in biology can be increasingly reductive and ahistorical, paleontologists teach us the astonishing breadth of past and present life on Earth and the long history that led to today’s biosphere. Great ebbs and flows of biological diversity, appearances of new life forms and the extinctions of long existing ones, would go undiscovered without these efforts. They allow investigation of present and past life on Earth, from single-celled microbes to plants and animals (yes, including dinosaurs). Paleontology produces newsworthy discoveries.įossils, moreover, provide direct evidence for the long history of life, allowing paleontologists to test hypotheses about evolution with data only they provide. The oldest known jellyfish, from 505 million years ago. A 39-million-year-old whale, the heaviest animal that ever lived. Frozen in time, a 125-million-year-old mammal attacking a dinosaur.
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