Introduction To Paleontology PDF
Introduction To Paleontology PDF
Introduction To Paleontology PDF
Introduction
to Paleontology
Course Guidebook
Professor Stuart Sutherland
The University of British Columbia
Smithsonian®
PUBLISHED BY:
S
tuart Sutherland is a Professor of
Teaching in the Department of Earth,
Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at
the University of British Columbia (UBC). He
attended the University of Plymouth in the
southwest of England, where he received
a degree in Geology in 1987. In 1992, Professor Sutherland was awarded a
Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from the University of Leicester for his studies on
Silurian microfossils called Chitinozoa. His thesis examined the distribution and
taxonomy of these fossils and considered the enigmatic biological affinities of
the group and their usefulness in paleoceanographic studies.
i
been mentioned as a “popular professor” among students in two editions of
Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities.
Professor Sutherland developed his lifelong fascination with rocks and fossils
on family hikes in Derbyshire and the English Lake District. He now enjoys
studying geology and paleontology in the beautiful environment of Vancouver
and British Columbia.
ii Introduction to Paleontology
About Our Partner
F
ounded in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum
and research complex, consisting of 19 museums and galleries, the
National Zoological Park, and 9 research facilities. The total number of
artifacts, works of art, and specimens in the Smithsonian’s collections is estimated
at 138 million. These collections represent America’s rich heritage, art from across
the globe, and the immense diversity of the natural and cultural world.
iii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Course Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LECTURE GUIDES
LECTURE 1
History on a Geological Scale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
LECTURE 2
Life Cast in Ancient Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
LECTURE 3
Tools of the Paleontological Trade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
LECTURE 4
How Do You Fossilize Behavior? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
LECTURE 5
Taxonomy: The Order of Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
LECTURE 6
Minerals and the Evolving Earth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
LECTURE 7
Fossil Timekeepers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
LECTURE 8
Fossils and the Shifting Crust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
LECTURE 9
Our Vast Troves of Microfossils. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
iv
LECTURE 10
Ocean Fire and the Origin of Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
LECTURE 11
The Ancient Roots of Biodiversity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
LECTURE 12
Arthropod Rule on Planet Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
LECTURE 13
Devonian Death and the Spread of Forests. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
LECTURE 14
Life’s Greatest Crisis: The Permian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
LECTURE 15
Life’s Slow Recovery after the Permian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
LECTURE 16
Dinosaur Interpretations and Spinosaurus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
LECTURE 17
Whales: Throwing Away Legs for the Sea. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
LECTURE 18
Insects, Plants, and the Rise of Flower Power. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
LECTURE 19
The Not-So-Humble Story of Grass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
LECTURE 20
Australia’s Megafauna: Komodo Dragons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
LECTURE 21
Mammoths, Mastodons, and the Quest to Clone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
LECTURE 22
The Little People of Flores. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
LECTURE 23
The Neanderthal among Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Table of Contents v
LECTURE 24
Paleontology and the Future of Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Image Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
vi Introduction to Paleontology
Introduction to Paleontology
Scope
Of all the sciences, paleontology is probably one of the most narrative. It
combines elements of geology, biology, ecology, and many other disciplines
to peer back through time into vanished worlds. The pages of the story of
Earth are written in rocks and fossils that require careful collection and
interpretation, though.
We give special attention to the Smithsonian Institution, which has a rich history
of paleontological research. For example, we meet the fourth Secretary of
the Smithsonian, Charles Walcott, who discovered the now-famous Burgess
Shale that changed our understanding of life just after the Cambrian explosion.
And we learn how the Smithsonian’s important research role has continued,
with many new paleontological insights coming from work undertaken in the
Department of Paleobiology in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of National
History.
The first part of the course examines some of the fundamentals of the science.
As paleontology is a discipline rooted in time, we begin to come to grips with
the immense extent of Earth’s time by reviewing the deep history of the United
States’ capital, Washington DC. Following this, our attention turns to the fossils
themselves, their diversity, and the variety of ways in which they can form.
Finding, extracting, and preparing fossils will be covered, but also some of the
techniques and technologies paleontologists have in their tool kit today.
1
Not all fossils represent the remains of large creatures, and we investigate
how the behavior of organisms can be preserved and how a vast store of
paleontological information exists in a plethora of tiny microfossils. Once found,
extracted, and preserved, fossils have to be classified, and we consider some
of the challenges paleontologists face when bringing taxonomic order to their
finds. Fossils tell of the passage of time across eons, but we also discover
how more familiar cycles of days, months, and years might be recorded in the
fossilized remains of organisms.
Fossils can also help us unravel the geological dance of continents, and we
investigate how paleontology is instrumental in the study of paleogeography.
In addition, we also examine the evolution of the beautiful mineral heritage of
Earth, a turn to geology that highlights the interplay between Earth’s evolving
mineral heritage and the development of the biosphere.
The rest of the course focuses on some important fossil groups and events
in Earth’s history, starting with the birth of paleontology at the dawn of life,
potentially in the deep, dark ocean. The bewildering diversity of the biosphere
today is generally traced to an explosion of life early in the Cambrian period,
but we consider the potential roots of this explosion in even earlier times.
The most successful group of organisms during and following the Cambrian
explosion was arguably the arthropods, so we look to their origins and their
fascinating evolution. Life has not had an untroubled journey, though, with
5 major extinctions recorded through time. We investigate the Devonian
extinction, which occurred around 360 million years ago and may have had a
series of potential triggers, and also the greatest culling event that the planet
has witnessed, which occurred at the end of the Permian about 252 million
years ago.
We also examine fossils that are still highly debated in the scientific community,
such as the enigmatic but wonderfully bizarre Spinosaurus, claimed to be one
of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived, from around 30 million
years before the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex. Next, we turn to the fossil record
for a series of mammals that would progressively throw away their limbs for the
sea to become the beautiful and diverse whales, dolphins, and porpoises that
thrill us in today’s oceans. We also consider the critical role that flowering plants
2 Introduction to Paleontology
(including the grasses) have had in the biosphere, from their evolution during
the Mesozoic era to the profound influence that they have had in driving the
evolution of other creatures.
As we move toward the end of the course, the wonderful Komodo dragons from
Indonesia—and the tiny humans, Homo floresiensis, that lived with them on the
island of Flores—take us to times much closer to our own. Another member of
our family, Homo neanderthalensis, is covered, as are some of the mammoths
and mastodons that wandered the Earth at that time. We will discover what
fantastic new insights ancient DNA is providing in our understanding of both
mammoths and Neanderthals. We conclude with a survey of the possible
challenges the biosphere will face as it marches into the future and the role that
the science of paleontology may have in charting that future.
Introduction to Paleontology 3
Lecture
1 History on a Geological Scale
A
ll fossil creatures, and the vanished worlds they lived in, help us
understand our place in space and time. They can also act as a
vital benchmark for our appreciation of the Earth as it is today and
perhaps provide clues to its future. The National Museum of Natural History
is full of fossil clues to Earth’s past, and aided by the collections—and
some of the cutting-edge research in the Department of Paleobiology—
this course will explore the history of life from Earth’s earliest days to more
recent times in our planet’s history.
●● The Earth is 4.54 billion years old, a fantastically long time when compared
to the lifetime of a human. As such, in an attempt to comprehend the age
of the Earth, an analogy is often used. A common tool is to condense all of
Earth history into one calendar year.
●● On this scale, the Earth forms in the first second of January 1. This is a
time when our solar system was a crowded place with a variety of rocky
planets zipping around close to the Sun, and there would likely have been
collisions on a colossal scale. Some of these encounters would add mass
to growing young worlds while others probably obliterated each other in
cataclysmic events.
●● We start to find the first abundant fossils, those that possessed shells, on
the calendar around November 18, fairly late in the year, and animals with
4 legs, or tetrapods, don’t stride onto land until around December 1. The
dinosaurs went into extinction on December 26, and Stonehenge was built
just 30 seconds before midnight on December 31.
4
●● However, given that the National Museum of Natural History is located
along the front yard of the United States, better known as the National
Mall, let’s use that as our timeline. On that timeline, the origin of Earth, 4.54
billion years ago, can be placed at the Washington Monument, with today
represented by the United States Capitol building.
●● Let’s start outside of our timeline—before the formation of Earth. The point
that is just 29 meters in front of the Washington Monument makes it around
4.6 billion years ago, or 60 million years before Earth’s first day. If you could
transport yourself back in time, you would be in open space. There would
be no Earth—just a nebula of dust and gas.
●● Let’s move forward in time to the first day of Earth and the Washington
Monument. On our timeline, this is day 1, with the formation of a rocky
planetary body that will evolve over the next 4.54 billion years into the
Earth we know today. The Earth was heated after it formed, a combination
of kinetic energy released from the impacts of the remaining debris in the
solar system and from the concentration of radioactive elements in the
young planet’s interior.
●● Washington DC at this time would have been a magma ocean, just like the
rest of the planet, and it would take time for the Earth to cool and for its first
solid skin, the crust, to form.
●● Some of the oldest evidence of Earth’s solid crust comes from Australia in
the form of fragments of an older rock contained in a younger rock. This
is called a conglomerate. Isotopic analysis of those fragments, contained
in that conglomerate and specifically from crystals called zircons, indicate
that Earth had a solid crust at about 4.4 billion years. On our timeline, that
places us just 67 meters away from the Washington Monument.
●● It would appear that the Earth had a “surface” of sorts very early in its
history. In addition, isotopic analysis of those zircons, using different
ratios of various stable elemental isotopes, hints at liquid water, too. The
presence of liquid water in these distant times opens up the possibility that
life may have a much older history than we initially thought.
●● At 356 meters from the Washington Monument, on the north side of the
mall is the National Museum of American History and on the south side is
the United States Department of Agriculture. On our timeline, we are at 3.8
billion years ago—we have completed a little more than 16% of our walk—
and at this point in history, Earth, and the rest of the inner solar system, was
in a meteor and comet shooting gallery. This would last about 300 million
years and is called the late heavy bombardment period.
●● If life had evolved around 4 billion years ago, it probably had to survive
deep in Earth’s crust, because some have suggested that these early
impact events may have in effect sterilized the Earth’s surface. It is not
until around 400 million years later, at 3.4 billion years, that we find our
first fossils. On our timeline, we are at the eastern edge of the National
Museum of American History.
6 Introduction to Paleontology
●● By the time we walk past the National Museum of Natural History, at 2.4
billion years, life would be enduring another crisis: a super glaciation called
a snowball Earth event that would encase our planet in ice for millions of
years. On our timeline, we have covered more than 47% of Earth’s history.
●● Associated with the end of the snowball event would be a rise in oxygen
levels and the deposition of rocks in banded-iron formations, rich in iron
oxides, demonstrating that our atmosphere was evolving. This change was
caused by photosynthetic bacteria releasing oxygen as a waste product
and, in the process, changing our planet forever.
●● By 1.2 billion years ago, or 578 meters from the Capitol building, we have
evidence of the first multicellular life-form—Bangiomorpha, probably a
simple red algae—and by 720 million years ago, or 346 meters from the
Capitol, the snowballs had returned and then end 650 million years ago,
in the middle of the Capitol reflecting pool. We have now completed more
than 85% of our walk through time.
●● But this was just the beginning. Around 100 million years later,
microcontinents that include parts of what is now western Europe would
slam into this part of the world, raising the mountains even higher and
causing magmas to be intruded into the deformed rocks.
●● Then, at 320 million years ago, Africa collides with this growing continental
landmass. This is moving us toward the formation of a supercontinent
called Pangaea and in the process raises the mountains even more. The
remnants of those mountains are the Appalachians, which were as high as
the Alps or the Himalayas when they were young.
●● After this collision, and just 32.8 meters closer to the Capitol building, life in
DC and around the world goes into crisis at 252 million years ago. Life on
Earth would be laid to waste, with more than 90% of all species going into
extinction—the greatest of the 5 major mass extinctions our planet has faced.
8 Introduction to Paleontology
oceans and the release of even more greenhouse gases as methane
stored in ocean sediments destabilized and escaped into the atmosphere.
●● From this point, the dinosaurs would have another 44.5 million years to rule
the planet, but then on the steps of the Capitol building on our timeline, at
about 66 million years ago, around 2300 kilometers to the southwest of
DC, a 10-kilometer object comes screaming into the atmosphere and slams
into Yucatán, ending the reign of those magnificent beasts.
●● The date of arrival, and origins, of the first people in North America is
currently somewhat in flux, but an early North American culture known for
their stone tools, called the Clovis culture, is generally agreed to be found
●● Around 0.3 centimeters before the end of our timeline, at 6000 years ago,
many miles away from DC, we have evidence of the founding of one of
Earth’s first cities, Uruk, in what is now modern-day Iraq. In this last 0.3
centimeters of our timeline is effectively all of what we could call recorded
human history. Everything that we consider ancient on a human timescale
is dwarfed by the immensity of the age of the Earth.
Questions to consider:
1. What should we consider to be Earth’s day 1?
Suggested Reading:
Fortey, Earth.
Levin and King Jr, The Earth Through Time.
PALEOMAP Project, http://www.scotese.com.
10 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture
2 Life Cast in Ancient Stone
I
n this lecture, you will learn about paleontology, including how
paleontology developed as a science, what the chances are of
becoming a fossil, what the common modes of fossilization are, and what
exceptional preservation is. Although only a tiny portion of life on Earth has
become fossilized, that portion still represents an enormous cache of material
for future paleontologists to examine. New discoveries of fossil bonanzas
and new approaches and techniques in paleontology and paleobiology will
likely continue to surprise and delight generations of scientists to come.
●● Fossils have been a part of human culture for a long time. A very early
reference to fossils comes from the 6th century B.C. Greek philosopher
Xenophanes, who concluded from his examination of fossil fish and shells
that water must have covered much of the Earth’s surface at one time in
the past, meaning that he understood that there was a deeper historical
narrative to our planet that could be told by the use of fossils.
●● Similar ideas were proposed in 1088 by the Chinese naturalist Shen Kuo,
who found fossils in the Taihang Mountains and decided that they indicated
that shorelines had shifted over time. He also found bamboo fossils in
Shaanxi province, a part of China that is currently too dry for bamboo to
grow, and concluded that climate change must have occurred at some
time in the past.
11
●● These are all really modern concepts—concepts of sea level and climate
change, the passage of vast amounts of time, and the processes that
operate in the Earth to form fossils—and in the West, they would be largely
ignored or forgotten.
●● It was one of Cuvier’s students, Henri de Blainville, who would give the
study of fossils a name. At first, he chose the term “paleozoologie” in 1817,
but by 1822, after a number of iterations, he settled on the more inclusive
“palaeontologie,” which would cover both fossil plants and animals.
12 Introduction to Paleontology
●● This is an idea that would be taken up by Smith’s brother-in-law, John
Phillips, who in 1841 published the first geological timescale. He divided
geological time into 3 of the eras we use today: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic,
and Cenozoic. Although the names and dates on the timescale would
change considerably over time, paleontologists and geologists now had a
yardstick that they could use to delve into the past.
●● North America has its share of famous paleontologists, too. For example,
Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope would expand our understanding of
dinosaurs during the “great dinosaur rush” in Colorado, Nebraska, and
Wyoming in the late 1800s. In 1909, one of the most famous secretaries of
the Smithsonian, Charles Walcott, would stumble across the Burgess Shale
in British Columbia in the Canadian Rockies.
Becoming a Fossil
●● The chances of anything becoming a fossil are pretty slim. The fact we
have fossils at all speaks to the sheer numbers of individuals and species
that have existed through time. With all their countless billions, it would
14 Introduction to Paleontology
only take a tiny fraction to fossilize to leave a substantial fossil record in
the rocks.
●● But let’s consider those that do make it. What factors did they have in their
favor? How do you maximize your chance of becoming a fossil? First, being
in the right place increases your chance of becoming a fossil. To form a
fossil, you need to get your body buried as quickly as possible—out of
the way of scavengers and preferably sealed from oxygen, or in reduced
oxygen conditions. That isn’t going to happen on an open plain or in a high
mountainous region, for example.
●● Because being buried in sediments is probably your best bet for becoming
a fossil, organisms that live in aquatic environments, such as lakes or rivers,
will have a greater chance of becoming a fossil. On the whole, aquatic
creatures that live in the oceans and other water bodies that are receiving
vast quantities of sediment via rivers and streams will have a greater
preservation potential than terrestrial, land-based organisms.
●● But considering hard parts, life has used a wide variety of materials for
protection and structural support. Calcium carbonate, or calcite, is a very
common mineral used by many organisms, including bryozoans, corals,
brachiopods, mollusks, and many arthropods and echinoderms.
●● But it’s not just the durability of the materials that we have to consider.
Another factor is how that material is organized. For example, sponges
are composed of discrete structural elements called spicules. The various
scaffolding units of sponges are more common in the fossil record than
16 Introduction to Paleontology
fossils of the original complete organism. Corals, however, secrete a single
robust skeletal element, and as a result, the preservation potential of the
entire organism is better than that of the sponges.
Modes of Fossilization
●● The same process can occur in some circumstances when organic material
becomes completely replaced by mineralizing fluids, a process called
petrifaction. This can occur in both plant and animal fossils.
●● The deposit is called an oil shale due to the high amount of organic
material it contains, and it formed in the calm shallow regions of a lake.
The sediments are finely laminated and represent seasonal changes in
deposition. Such laminations are called varves. During warmer periods,
probably during spring and summer, when organic production in the lake
was high, dark organic-rich layers are deposited. These alternate with more
windblown mineral material from the cooler part of the year.
Questions to consider:
1. In which environments should we expect the greatest potential
preservation?
2. How much of the Earth’s biosphere was never preserved in the fossil
record?
18 Introduction to Paleontology
Suggested Reading:
Benton and Harper, Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record.
Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
I
n this lecture, you will consider some of the tools and techniques
used by paleontologists, and you will discover how new technologies
are opening up windows into the past in a way that would have
astounded the founding fathers and mothers of geology and paleontology
in the 18th century. You will learn how fossils are found in the field, how
fossils are collected, how fossils are prepared, what the new tools of the
trade are, and how life is given to fossils through scientific illustration and
reconstruction.
Finding Fossils
●● Geologists know that our dynamic planet rarely allows the thin crust we live
on to stay still for long. Horizontal strata more often than not will become
tilted or folded over time as the continents wander, collide, and raise
20
mountains, twisting and distorting the geological pages of Earth’s history
book.
●● This can complicate matters when we are trying to read Earth’s story, which
is why a vital skill for any paleontologist out in the field is the ability to
create and read geological maps.
●● Even though aerial and satellite photography and gravity and magnetic
surveys can help with mapping today, the geoscientist still has to rely
mostly on getting down on the ground and hiking along outcrops of
rocks. Like the field kits of the first geological mapmakers, basic field kits
include a geological hammer, a hand lens, a compass (with a clinometer for
measuring the dip of strata), and a notebook (to record findings). GPS and
electronic data storage devices are also used.
●● Even though a map may help you focus in on the area you should be
looking for fossils, there may still be a lot of hunting around to find the
fossils once you’re in the field. A good start is to eyeball the ground for
fragments of fossils in what is called float, or loose pieces of rock that have
been eroded from an outcrop that actually contains the fossils.
Collecting Fossils
●● But what about collecting the fossils once they have been located? This will
vary depending on what fossils you are finding, but most fossils, such as the
shells of various marine creatures, can often be collected by the application
of hammer, chisel, crowbars, and a little muscle, making sure that eyes are
protected by safetly glasses because many rocks have a high silica content
and splinter into dangerous shards when hit. Once recorded, the fossils are
wrapped to protect them and placed in a bag with an identification number.
●● This becomes trickier when dealing with large fossils in rock. Sometimes a
small pick and a hammer just aren’t going to be enough. That’s when you
might see a field paleontologist employing a jackhammer or a backhoe.
●● Plaster and burlap straps are applied to the specimen, forming a jacket,
and once hardened, the fossils can be removed and transported back to
the lab. Sometimes, given the remotness of sections being studied, this
could require a helicopter.
22 Introduction to Paleontology
impossible to see, even with a 20x hand lens. The best micropaleontologists
can do is find the right kind of rocks that might contain the fossils and hope
that they will find the fossils when they get back to the lab.
●● Back at the lab, in the case of larger specimens, the fossils have their
plaster jacket removed, and the long and careful process of removing
the fossil from the rock matrix begins. A number of tools are used for this,
including the air scribe, which acts like a miniature jackhammer, chipping
away at the rock matrix. When getting close to removing the majority of the
matrix, the air scribe’s impacts may “pop off” the last bits of rock, leaving
the fossils clean and exposed.
●● If a fossil is too fragile, or the matrix is too hard, fossil preparators may
use gentle grinding tools to help separate the fossil from the rock. When
getting too close to the fossil, tiny picks and needles are used to clean up
the specimen.
●● The preparation of fossils at the other end of the scale, with microfossils, is
somewhat different. The most common method of preparing microfossils
involves the use of various often-nasty acids, such as hydrofluoric acid, to
dissolve away the rocky matrix.
Studying Fossils
24 Introduction to Paleontology
●● Since then, microscopes have been used in many branches of
paleontology for studying various aspects of fossils, commonly by making
a thin section of the rock that reveals the anatomy of well-preserved fossils
as light passes through them. Optical microscopy has its limitations, though.
●● Some of the electrons fired at the object from the SEM travel deeper in the
specimen, get absorbed, and cause a release of x-rays. These x-rays can
then be used to determine the composition on the object being studied;
all you need is an SEM fitted with an x-ray detector. This technique, called
energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, has been used by a research team
headed by Dr. Conrad Labandeira at the Smithsonian’s National Museum
of National History to look at exceptionally preserved material in Jurassic
lake sediments in northeastern China.
●● There are other tools for determining the composition of materials, and in
some cases, determining the relative proportions of very specific isotopic
components of a material can provide vital environmental information
about the past. An isotope is a variant of an element that differs only in the
number of neutrons it contains in its nucleus.
●● Some isotopes are unstable and decay into more stable elements over
various time periods; others are stable and hang around in the environment.
Isotopes of carbon, oxygen, sulphur, nitrogen, and a whole bunch of others
react in very specific ways to different environmental factors that speak to
various events in Earth’s past.
●● Even with all the new advances in imagining and data manipulation, the role
of the scientific illustrator is still vital both in research and in public display
of materials. Very often, an illustration can highlight features that might be
too subtle to be picked out on a photograph and also correct for problems,
such as poor depth of field or distortion, that can occur with a camera lens.
26 Introduction to Paleontology
●● From materials such as specimens, photographs, and a range of other
background material, the scientific illustrator begins to bring life to lost
landscapes and the animals and plants that populated them. The result
is the point at which art and science meet to produce wonderful images
that breathe life into worlds long since vanished. These images are the
products of all the fieldwork, preparation, analysis, and interpretation that is
part of the science of paleontology.
Questions to consider:
1. What critical information is lost when a fossil cannot be tied to where it
was originally recovered?
2. What are the advantages of more traditional artistic representations in
paleontology when compared to modern visualization techniques?
Suggested Reading:
Taylor, DK Eyewitness Books.
Thompson, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fossils.
U.S. Department of the Interior: Bureau of Land Management, “Hobby
Collection,” http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/more/CRM/paleontology/
fossil_collecting.html.
W
ith the tools of logic and deduction, paleontologists can act as
detectives to piece together the lives of long-dead creatures.
In this lecture, you will discover a powerful class of fossils that
essentially is the fossilized behavior of organisms: trace fossils. You will learn
what trace fossils are and how they form; what they tell us about the evolution
of life; what traces creatures leave about how they moved, fed, and built a
home; and how fossilized behavior can track changes in an environment.
Trace Fossils
●● Trace fossils are found in both marine and terrestrial environments and
can be made by a variety of creatures. In sediments, they can be tracks
and trails and burrows and borings. In the world of plants and insects, they
record plant damage produced by feeding, egg depositing, pollinating,
and a whole host of other activities.
●● Ever since life became big, it has been interacting with the environment
in a very physical manner. Creatures have been disturbing the physical
structures that occur in sediments, such as fine laminations or ripple marks,
and basically giving things a good mix, what is called bioturbation.
●● The study of trace fossils is called ichnology and can essentially be regarded
as the study of fossilized behavior. Unlike body fossils, which consist of the
actual parts or impressions of an organism, trace fossils have limited use in
biostratigraphy—the dividing up and correlation of rocks in a time sense—
but trace fossils have several advantages in other areas of paleontology.
28
●● First, trace fossils often develop under specific environmental conditions,
making them great for paleoenvironmental interpretation. Another distinct
advantage is that you can be certain that a trail or footprint has not been
moved. This is a problem with body fossils: If you are using them to
interpret an ancient environment, you have to make sure that the creature
has not been moved from one environment to another post-mortem. But
for a trace fossil, where you find it is where it formed.
●● This misidentification of some of these tracks and trails as worms and plants
may explain why trace fossil are named like fossil plants and animals, using
the Latin binomial system with a genus and species name.
●● The fact that we are not dealing with an individual species but a type of
fossil behavior can cause some confusion, though. A trace fossil is given
a generic Latin name—for example, Rusophycus. However, because this is
a type of behavior—in this case, where an organism rested—Rusophycus
can be produced by a whole range of different organisms.
●● This potential confusion when studying and naming trace fossils is why
we tend to classify them by the behavior they represent and not by the
creatures that produced them.
●● There are several types of traces that can be found. Repichnia are traces
that an animal makes as it moves. Fodichnia describe various feeding
●● The divisions between some of these classifications might not be hard and
fast. Perhaps a creature’s living burrow could also act as a feeding burrow.
However, these classifications provide a framework on which we can start
to hang various types of fossil behavior.
30 Introduction to Paleontology
●● The first fossil evidence of life is found around 3.4 billion years ago in the
fossil microbes found in the Strelley Pool sandstone of western Australia.
In the same section, though, laminated structures have been found that
have been interpreted as stromatolites, which are commonly produced
by photosynthetic cyanobacteria. These bacteria trap grains of sediment
in their sticky, mucilaginous sheath and then move upward through the
sediment, creating a new layer. In this way, they commonly “dome upward,”
producing column-like sedimentary structures.
●● Their diversity over time also has a story to tell. Throughout the Precambrian
period, they are a common component of many shallow marine settings,
but by the time we get to the Cambrian period, they are only at about 20%
of their former abundance.
●● This change is called the Cambrian substrate revolution, where not only
grazing animals were staring to have an impact on the planet, but also
burrowing animals, who would churn the sediment still further. After the
evolution of various worms and arthropods during the proliferation of life
called the Cambrian explosion, sediments in shallow marine environments
went from fairly firm, stabilized by microbial mats, to mushier.
●● Another type of trace fossil, coprolites (fecal pellets), may have also made
a significant contribution to the Earth system at this time. By producing
large fecal structures that sink and deliver carbon rapidly to the ocean floor
and sediments, they lessened the oxygen demand of surface waters. This
may have promoted oxygen enrichment in the oceans and allowed for the
evolution of larger and even more complex creatures.
●● The trace fossil assemblage Treptichnus pedum not only defines the base
of the Cambrian period but also the whole Phanerozoic eon, marking a
transition from the Precambrian into a new world full of complex life.
32 Introduction to Paleontology
Advanced Behaviors
●● Trace fossils can provide insights into how life leaves a record of some
pretty fundamental behavior—specifically, how creatures moved, how they
fed, and how some of them built a home.
●● A mobile fauna is a big leap forward for the biosphere. By the time we get
to the Cambrian, various creatures, such as trilobites, are engaged in a
variety of different activities, from furrowing through sediments to skipping
across the sediment surface.
●● But not all marine creatures simply “meander” around on the surface of the
ocean floor. Sometimes, movement is needed in another direction—when
a catastrophe occurs. There is a class of trace fossils called Fugichnia, or
escape traces.
●● Trace fossils have also helped answer questions about how marine
vertebrates moved. A long paleontological debate has centered around
how the Triassic semiaquatic marine reptile Nothosaurus swam. Did they
sweep their limbs in a figure-8 motion (the mode of locomotion penguins
use today), or did they employ a rowing motion with their limbs?
Environmental Analysis
●● The general character of these trace fossil ichnofacies has remained fairly
consistent from the Cambrian to the present day. The implication of this
is that although the producers of the traces have changed through time,
34 Introduction to Paleontology
the manner in which they were responding to the environment—their
behavior—has not changed very much.
●● Trace fossil assemblages not only tie down specific environments, but
they can also help chart changes in environmental conditions over time,
whether that is long-term change, such as with variations in sea level, or
short-term events, such as storm surges.
Questions to consider:
1. What trace fossils might we humans be leaving for future
paleontologists to discover?
2. Why can trace fossils rarely be tied to any one particular organism?
Suggested Reading:
Lockley, Tracking Dinosaurs.
Seilacher, Trace Fossil Analysis.
I
n this lecture, you will consider one of the fundamental underpinning
pillars of paleontology: the science of classifying and naming
organisms—the science of taxonomy. To some, this may sound trivial,
but without it, there would be no paleontology. In this lecture, you will
learn who Carl Linnaeus was and what Linnaean classification is, how
taxonomy is different for paleontology, and why classification is important
in paleontology.
Linnaean Classification
●● In 1735, Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema naturae, which
had a profound effect on biology and paleontology. In this book, all of
creation is organized into 3 major kingdoms. Each of those kingdoms is
divided into subgroupings of class, order, genus, and species—significantly
fewer than the subdivisions we have today. Naturalists before Linnaeus
often used a somewhat arbitrary grouping of creatures—for example,
groupings that comprise all creatures that live in water or all domestic
animals. Linnaeus was one of the first to group genera into higher taxa
based on somewhat logical similarities.
●● Linnaeus’s 3 kingdoms are the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the
mineral kingdom.
The animal kingdom is comprised of Mammalia (mammals), Aves (birds),
Amphibia (including retiles and non-bony fish), Insecta (all arthropods,
not just insects), and the Vermes (basically all other invertebrates,
including worms, mollusks, and echinoderms).
For the plant kingdom, Linnaeus creates a system of 24 classes of
plants based on the number and organization of a plant’s sexual organs,
36
Carl Linnaeus
●● In the days before the Systema naturae, naming creatures could be quite
messy. Take, for example, the tomato. Prior to Linnaeus, it went by the
rather grand and long-winded name of Solanum cauke inermi herbaceo,
folis pinnatis incises: “The solanum with the smooth stem which is
herbaceous and has incised pinnate leaves.” Under the Linnaean binomial
system, it becomes Lycopersicon esulentum—much less of a mouthful.
38 Introduction to Paleontology
●● When you actually study the characteristics of certain fish—for example,
a lungfish and a cod—you will find that a lungfish shares more features in
common with a frog than it does with a cod, even though a lungfish under
the Linnaean system would be classified under Pisces, “fish.”
●● Linnaeus placed fossils within his mineral kingdom under Fossilia. Unlike
rocks and minerals, the binomial system for paleontology persisted—which
is understandable, given that we are dealing with former life—and the
zoological or botanical codes of taxonomy that apply to living animals and
plants likewise apply to fossil forms, too.
●● However, the problem that we have with fossils compared with living
creatures is that, as fossils, a lot of the information that could be used to
classify these creatures is simply gone. As such, drawing the lines between
species can be difficult.
●● Imagine how different human beings can look depending on their sex,
age, historical background, and environment. Add to that the problem that
paleontologists may be dealing with incomplete, fragmentary, or otherwise
modified material and the problem is compounded.
●● Three of the most iconic dinosaurs can help illustrate some of the problems
that paleontologists face. Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops
were discovered by famous paleontologist Othniel Marsh in the late 1800s.
40 Introduction to Paleontology
●● Taxonomically, the first named specimen has precedence, so all of these
animals became apatosaurs, with Brontosaurus excelsus renamed
Apatosaurus excelsus.
●● Since the time that the genus Brontosaurus had been demoted, however,
new sauropod specimens had been recovered, and these paleontologists
took advantage of the new discoveries to apply an extensive statistical
analysis of the differences between various features of these animals.
●● Even so, there was a particular difference he found in the shape and
arrangement of plates on their backs: Some specimens had plates that
were pointed and tall while others possessed plates that were broader
and rounded. Saitta suggests that this could represent sexual dimorphism
in the dinosaurs. He proposed that the broad, round plates belong to the
males and the tall, pointed plates belong to the females.
●● Triceratops was first discovered near Denver, Colorado, in 1887 and was
originally described by Marsh as a bison, Bison alticornis. However, he
eventually realized that they belonged to a horned dinosaur he named
Triceratops. A controversy would erupt regarding this dinosaur in 2009,
when paleontologist Jack Horner from the Museum of the Rockies and his
graduate student John Scannella would propose a hypothesis that would
significantly reduce the number of dinosaurs we have on the books.
42 Introduction to Paleontology
●● These dinosaurs
look quite
different, though.
Torosaurus has a
much larger frill,
which is perforated
with large oval holes—
perforations that are
lacking in Triceratops.
Although these animals overlap
in time, they were regarded as
being so different that they were not
only different species but also different genera. But Horner and Scannella
take a different view, claiming that these differences just reflect different
developmental stages of the same dinosaur.
●● Horner thinks that this could be part of a wider problem. He estimates that
perhaps more than 1/3 of all dinosaur species in the Late Cretaceous, where
Triceratops is found, may never have existed. He believes that many may
just represent different growth stages, misinterpreted as separate species.
●● It may appear that questions about classification are very academic, but
just consider the debate sparked by the classification of Triceratops,
Nedoceratops, and Torosaurus.
Questions to consider:
1. What problems do palaeontologists face when attempting to classify
fossils?
2. With a better understanding of the relationships between organisms, do
groups like “fish” and “reptiles” make sense anymore?
Suggested Reading:
Blunt, Linnaeus.
Foote and Miller, Principles of Paleontology.
44 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture Minerals and the Evolving
6 Earth
T
his lecture will consider the evolution of our planet with a focus
on the evolution of Earth’s minerals—a perspective that considers
how minerals have influenced all of Earth’s systems, including the
biosphere and its history as revealed by paleontology. In this lecture, you
will learn what the first minerals are, which minerals develop after the Earth
formed, how we reach the wonderful diversity of minerals we see today,
and what role life would have in that story.
●● The idea of looking at our planet through the lens of minerals was
developed by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Hazen and his colleagues, from various research institutions, proposed
that many of the 4400 minerals we know of today have “coevolved” with
the biosphere through time.
●● Hazen and his colleagues proposed 3 eras and 10 stages of Earth’s mineral
evolution. Each stage sees dramatic changes in the diversity of Earth’s
near-surface recoverable minerals.
●● In the beginning—about 13.7 billion years ago, at the time of the big bang—
there were no minerals. It is estimated that by about 377,000 years after
45
the big bang, the first hydrogen and helium atoms started to form. It is
likely that during these cataclysmic events, some of the first microscopic
crystalline minerals, around a dozen, would form, including diamond,
graphite, and various silicates.
●● This cloud was contracting and spinning under its own gravity, forming
a concentration of material at its center. This is known as the T Tauri
phase of a star’s development. The star is not yet able to fuse hydrogen
and initiate nuclear fusion but is still bright and radiant as it collapses
under gravity.
●● Even at this stage, though, it is still energetic and hot, with the young
protostar heating up a disk of material that surrounds it. This is the
protoplanetary disk, and it from this that the planets will eventually form.
It is thought that around 60 mineral species get cooked, and thus form, in
this particular stage of the solar system’s development.
●● Some of those early mineral phases have been preserved and occasionally
fall to Earth as a class of meteorites called primitive chondrites. These
developed as the dust and Sun-bathed minerals started to accrete
together, initially due to electrostatic attraction, a bit like dust bunnies, and
later, as they became larger, under gravity.
46 Introduction to Paleontology
●● An interesting feature
of these meteorites Meteorites
are the small (around
1 millimeter) spherical
chondrules. These
probably represent
molten droplets that
were formed by flash
heating as the early Sun
cooked the materials in its
surrounding protoplanetary
disk—fascinating echoes of
conditions in that early cloud before the Earth was born.
●● Over time, these small chondrites would accrete together to form larger
bodies. If larger than about 200 kilometers in diameter, heat from the
decay of radioactive isotopes trapped inside these rock piles and heat
generated by collisions would cause the interiors of these larger bodies to
melt, or at least partially melt, and produce new suites of minerals.
●● This also tells us that the early solar system was a busy shooting gallery
with multiple mergers, titanic collisions, and destruction of some of these
early planetary bodies. By the end of this stage, all this activity would see
the cumulative count of minerals rise to about 60.
●● After the Earth had formed and differentiated, the light scum of less dense
minerals that remained close to the surface would have cooled to form
a blackened basaltic skin. This black crust would be repeatedly recycled
though, melting and generating magma that would undergo an important
processes called fractional crystallization.
48 Introduction to Paleontology
●● Because granites are significantly less dense that basaltic rocks, they are
very buoyant and tend to float on the surface of the dense rocks in the
mantle. These accumulations of buoyant granitic rocks would be the seeds
of the first continents.
●● Earth, and possibly Venus, reached this stage of granite production and
mineral evolution, but our own planet—probably uniquely in the solar
system—would have more stages to pass through before its current final
inventory was reached.
●● The next stage involves the initiation of a process that we think is only
found on our planet, at least in our solar system: plate tectonics, which
describes the large-scale motions of the fractured plates that make up the
Earth’s outer surface, the lithosphere.
●● At plate boundaries, parts of the lithosphere can slide past each other, but
the lithosphere can also spread apart, generating new oceanic lithosphere.
Some boundaries are marked by the collision of plates, forming large
mountains, or by plates being destroyed as one is forced under another in
a process called subduction.
●● As far as we know, Earth is the only planet to have initiated extensive and
prolonged plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is a significant reason for the
complexity and diversity of Earth’s geology and biosphere.
●● All this plate tectonics–related activity brings our mineral count to 1500.
●● The presence of abundant and very evident life probably explains the
overwhelming bulk of the 4400 minerals on our planet today. We have
paleontological evidence of life at around 3.4 billion years ago—bacteria
that were metabolizing sulfur-based compounds. It would appear, however,
that life initially had very little effect on increasing the mineralogical
diversity of our planet.
●● That would change dramatically, though, about 2.5 billion years ago, when
we start to see significant numbers of certain microbes spreading across
the planet—microbes that had developed a photochemical trick called
photosynthesis.
50 Introduction to Paleontology
●● Another consequence of this availability of oxygen would be a dramatic
change in the chemistry of the oceans. Prior to the great oxidation event,
the Earth’s oceans had been largely anoxic—that is, they contained little to
no dissolved oxygen. As a consequence, unoxidized iron was the common
form found dissolved in seawater.
●● With the introduction of oxygen into this system, unoxidized iron was
oxidized into insoluble minerals, such as magnetite and hematite, which
would effectively form rust in the oceans that would settle out in layers on
the ocean floor of continent shelves, alternating with layers of less iron-rich
chert. These so-called banded-iron formations are some of the most iron-
rich ores on Earth today and are the result of this significant change in the
Earth system around 2.3 billion years ago.
●● What follows, from 1.8 to 1 billion years ago, is known as the boring billion,
which sees no new major innovations in life or minerals.
●● Between 1 billion to 542 million years ago, the Earth would suffer a series
of super glaciations, or snowball Earth events. It is thought that the end
of each snowball would be associated with extreme weather conditions,
which would thoroughly mix the oceans, flooding them with nutrients and
causing a bloom of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria.
Questions to consider:
1. Because a mineral is loosely defined as a naturally occurring crystalline
solid, is ice a mineral?
2. Could a complex mineralogy be used in the search for life on other
planets?
Suggested Reading:
Chesterman, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Rocks
and Minerals.
Hazen, “The Evolution of Minerals.”
52 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture
7 Fossil Timekeepers
H
ow do fossils speak to time and cycles of time? They are
obviously representatives of times past, but is there more to them
than simply being old? This lecture will address several questions:
Do we need fossils as clocks? How do fossils act as the time keepers of
geology? Do days fossilize? Can fossils record changes in the cycles of the
solar system over hundreds of thousands of years, or even longer?
●● Our ability to date our planet and its history is becoming more and more
sophisticated. Scientists such as Marie and Pierre Curie and Ernest
Rutherford advanced our understanding of radioactivity and radioactive
decay and, with it, our ability to date our planet.
●● Because we know the rate at which the parent material decays into the
daughter material, we can calculate how long decay has been progressing.
The technique assumes that no parent or daughter material has been
added to the sample—what is called a closed system.
53
●● Fortunately, crystals in igneous rocks, rocks that cool from a magma, form
great closed systems that trap small quantities of radioactive isotopes and,
as such, act as clocks, ticking away as time passes by.
●● The time it takes for half of the parent to decay into the daughter material
is called the half-life. For uranium 238 to lead 206, that is about 4.47 billion
years. So, even in Earth’s oldest rocks, if there is material to analyze, there
should be enough parent material left to work out the ratio and calculate
an age.
●● Although the vast majority (around 90%) of rocks in Earth’s crust are
igneous rocks, the vast majority of the rocks that cover the surface of the
crust—those that contain the majority of the history of life—are sedimentary
rocks. Clastic sedimentary rocks that form from the erosion of older rocks
may contain datable crystals from igneous rocks.
●● But if you find such a crystal that has not been compromised by the
erosion that created the sedimentary rock, it will not provide a date for the
sediment or the fossils it contains. It will only provide a date for the igneous
rock from which it was derived.
●● For the first time, scientists had the ability to order the geological strata they
found based on the order of the fossils they were finding in them. This also
permitted geologists and paleontologists to correlate between areas in time.
●● This would allow William Smith to create the first large time-based geological
map. This development is the start of the science of biostratigraphy, in which
we consider the distribution of a particular fossil species from the time it first
54 Introduction to Paleontology
Sedimentary rocks
originated to the time it becomes extinct. The time this represents is called
a fossil’s range.
●● Such fossil ranges are collected from many different sections and cross-
correlated with other fossils and dating techniques. In this way, we can get a
pretty good estimate of the slice of time a particular fossil species represents.
●● As such, a species that has traveled far and died young makes the best
fossils for dating. This is because they define a focused slice of time over a
wide area. Not all fossils are great time keepers, though; some species just
existed for much too long and, as a result, don’t provide us with sufficient
time resolution.
●● Given that, some of the best fossils for correlation are fossils that would
range far and wide across the oceans, such as free swimmers or planktonic
floaters, who are found in many locations and across many environments.
Microfossils—a broad group of tiny fossils, generally less than 1 millimeter
●● For example, consider creatures with shells or skeletons that live in shallow
marine environments that respond to daily tidal variations. Although care
has to be taken to account for other environmental factors, creatures such
as bivalves (clams) show growth lines that correspond to daily, monthly,
seasonal, or yearly environmental changes. These correspond to packets
of different thicknesses of growth bands; collectively, this accounting of
time is known as sclerochronology.
●● One of the first studies to apply this technique was in 1963, when John Wells
of Cornell University interpreted fine ridges on the surface of fossil corals
from the Devonian period as being circadian in nature. The ridges were
further grouped into regular bands thought to be lunar-monthly breeding
cycles. He also identified major annulations that he suggested corresponded
to seasonal-yearly environmental changes. From his calculations, Wells
estimated that the Devonian year consisted of about 400 days.
●● This means that the Earth’s rotation about its axis has been slowing down.
The Earth’s initial spin at the time it formed was due in part to the angular
momentum of the initial spinning nebula from which the solar system formed.
56 Introduction to Paleontology
Following this event, the Earth may have zipped around on its axis in just
6 hours.
●● Since then, the Earth’s rotation has been slowing down, mostly due to the
Moon’s effect on ocean tides. The Moon’s gravity is dragging on a tidal bulge
in the oceans, slowing the Earth down like a brake on the wheel of a car.
●● There are other factors that can affect day length, too. For example, it has
been estimated that the devastating 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake
in the Indian Ocean effectively shortened the length of the day by about
2.68 milliseconds. This megathrust earthquake saw a large portion of the
Indo-Australian plate suddenly shoved under Indonesia and into the planet.
In the same way that ice skaters pull their arms into their body, their center
of mass, to make them spin faster, the earthquake sped up the planet and
shortened, very slightly, the length of our day.
●● Fossils provide snapshots through time of the rate of Earth’s rotation. For
example, by the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the
Cretaceous, there were 371 days in a year. The Middle Permian year was
390 days long, with around 397 days in the Late Devonian.
●● Stromatolites are layered structures that form in shallow water. They grow
as microbial mats—commonly composed of cyanobacteria—trap, bind, and
cement sediments. The bacteria move upward daily, forming a new layer,
creating the laminations seen in the fossils.
●● Obliquity is the change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis, which is never vertical
but ranges from 21.1° to 24.5° and back again over a period of about 41,000
years. The tilt of the Earth’s axis doesn’t always stay pointing at the same
place in the, sky though; like a top, it moves in a circular manner that is
called precession over a period of around 23,000 years. This “wobble”
is largely controlled by the gravitational influences of the Sun and Moon.
Eccentricity describes the change in the shape of Earth’s orbit over time,
from more circular to more elliptical over a period of about 100,000 years.
This change is caused by the gravitational influence of Jupiter and Saturn.
●● Each of these cycles will affect the amount of solar radiation striking the
Earth, but their greatest effects will be felt when these cycles all add
together. It is thought that in the current ice age, it is these cycles that are
a major influence in the retreat and expansion of ice over time. We are
currently in an interglacial time interval.
●● During a warmer period of Earth’s history, we can still detect these cycles
when the Earth doesn’t plunge into a glacial period under their influence
by using fossils. A good example comes from research of Dr. Brian Huber,
a micropaleontologist in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural
History’s Department of Paleobiology.
58 Introduction to Paleontology
and temperature. These changes will produce different signals from
different fossil communities, but one of the most sensitive are marine
microorganisms, such as the foraminifera that Dr. Huber studies.
●● One of these long-term cyclical proposals comes from David Raup and
Jack Sepkoski of The University of Chicago, who described, based on
changes in biodiversity over time, a periodic pattern of mass extinctions
with a 26-million-year periodicity. A popular explanation for this was an
increase in impacts of comets from a remote zone of the solar system.
Questions to consider:
1. How much of a record will we leave in Earth’s history?
2. Why is radiometric dating not the answer to all of our geological dating
needs?
Suggested Reading:
Benton and Harper, Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record,
chap. 7.
Winchester, The Map That Changed the World.
60 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture
8 Fossils and the Shifting Crust
E
xotic fossil assemblages can be set adrift on continents and
continental fragments to beach thousands of miles away in a
completely different part of the world. In doing so, they leave a
story of their origin and journey through time. In this lecture, you will learn
what paleobiogeography is, what the fossils in Alfred Wegener’s jigsaw
puzzle were, how fossils can time the closing of an ocean, and how fossils
trace the dance of continental fragments through time.
Paleobiogeography
●● Why are creatures where they are? We obviously don’t live on a planet
where life-forms are spread in a homogeneous manner; different types
of animals and plants have distributions and concentrations. Basically,
all creatures have a geographical range, some broad and some narrow.
Endemic species are only found in a specific area, while cosmopolitan
species are found in a range of environments.
●● Ecozones can also be recognized from Earth’s geological past, but in this
case, we have to consider the additional complication that wandering
continents add to the story. The first thing we need to consider is the
manner in which diversity changes, very broadly, across our planet. To do
61
that, we also need to think about how our planet’s magnetic field intersects
with the ground.
●● It has been suggested that the movement of liquid metal in the outer core
around the solid metal inner core, due to convection and the Coriolis effect
of the spinning Earth, produces electric currents that, in turn, generate
Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth is like a giant bar magnet, with lines of
force running from the North Pole to the South Pole. Just like a bar magnet,
on our planet, the magnetic field is inclined toward the vertical at the poles,
and at the equator it will be parallel to the surface of the ground. This
means that magnetic inclination and latitude are linked.
●● This signal can be locked into certain fine-grained sediments and basalt
lava when iron-rich minerals take up the magnetic inclination at the time of
their formation. So, if you can record the inclination of the magnetic field in
the rocks, you can also estimate the paleolatitude of that rock at its time
of formation. There is a relationship between latitude and the diversity of
organisms, too: The diversity of organisms is highest at the equator and
drops off toward the poles.
62 Introduction to Paleontology
sea, mountains, or even dense forest. In the ocean, barriers can include
swift currents or deeper parts of the ocean, where food resources may be
limited. Barriers could also be due to different temperature and climatic
regimes.
●● But with the dawn of plate tectonics, and the dynamic movements of
continents over time, a whole new way of looking at the dispersal of fossil
species came to light.
●● But perhaps some of his most compelling evidence for continental drift
came from fossils, many of whose current distribution is puzzling in the
context of a static planet. For example, fossils of Cynognathus, a meter-
long predator from the early Middle Triassic period, have been found in
South Africa and China. It could have walked to those locations based on
earlier views of static, immobile continents.
64 Introduction to Paleontology
though, to see how these mechanisms could operate over large oceans
and how they could account for the distribution of so many fossil species.
●● Eventually, the idea of drifting continents would be revived, but this time
with the more plausible mechanism of seafloor spreading. Scientists such
as Harry Hess, Marie Tharp, Bruce Heezen, and John Tuzo Wilson would
pull together information from ocean-floor topography, seismic records,
and ocean-floor magnetism to give us the theory of plate tectonics that we
are familiar with today.
●● The fossils are different because the western and eastern parts of
Newfoundland were in different climatic zones during the Cambrian on
opposite sides of the Iapetus Ocean, with the ocean being sufficiently
wide at that point to even prevent the mixing of marine species. The
2 faunas were brought together when the ocean closed. Where the 2
faunas now meet represents the line along which the eastern (Laurentian)
and western (Avalonian) terranes were sutured together in what today is
Newfoundland.
●● When the Atlantic Ocean opened up, splitting the continents apart again,
fragments of the Avalonian or Laurentian faunas were stranded on either
side of the ocean. Fossils would not only uncover the presence of this
ancient ocean; they would also help document its closure over time.
●● As the ocean started to close and the distance between North America
and Europe was reduced, creatures that had a planktonic larval stage
started to mix on either side. In addition to planktonic forms, nektonic,
free-swimming organisms were also able to make the crossing. As the
ocean narrowed even more, less mobile forms were able to make it
across. By the end of the Devonian, the Iapetus Ocean was sufficiently
narrow that even freshwater fish were similar in western Europe and
eastern North America.
66 Introduction to Paleontology
Exotic Terranes
●● Since the early days of plate tectonics, our understanding of the complexity
of the wandering continents has increased considerably. One of the
ways our understanding has become more complex is an appreciation
of what are called exotic terranes. In addition to large continental masses
lumbering around the planet, it was realized that small fragments of
continents have also been rifting off larger parent bodies, zipping around
the Earth like marbles, colliding with other areas, potentially thousands of
miles from where they originated.
Questions to consider:
1. Should we expect greater biodiversity during times of continental
amalgamation or fragmentation?
2. How much of the ancient history of the dancing continents and
continental fragments is lost to us?
Suggested Reading:
Keary, Klepeis, and Vine, Global Tectonics.
Plummer, Carlson, and Hammersley, Physical Geology.
Paleogeographic and Tectonic History of Western North America,
http://cpgeosystems.com/wnampalgeog.html.
68 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture Our Vast Troves of
9 Microfossils
M
icropaleontology is a world of paleontology that often gets
overlooked—quite literally—because it is the world of the very
small. In this lecture, you will learn about microfossils. You will
also learn about foraminifera, including how these fossils chart global
climate over 120 million years and what they tell us about the death of
the dinosaurs. You will also discover what microfossils tell us about how
evolution works.
Microfossils
●● There is no fixed definition of what a microfossil is. Basically, if it’s very small
and needs a microscope to be seen, you can call it a microfossil. Most
microfossils are less than 1 millimeter in size, but some are much larger.
Given such a broad definition, microfossils can come from a wide variety
of sources. They are also the first fossils we find in the geological record,
given that first life was probably microbial.
69
mostly known from those species that have an encystment stage as part of
their life cycles.
●● By the time we get to some of the first plant macrofossils, we start to see
an increasing diversity of spores, reflecting the spread and diversification
of plants across the coastal landscape.
Radiolaria
magnified 200x
70 Introduction to Paleontology
●● But larger animals are in on the microfossil game, too. Perhaps some of
the most famous are the conodonts. Initially, the conodont animal was
known only from its conodont elements: tiny teeth-like objects composed
of calcium phosphate. They are found from the Cambrian period all the
way through the end of the Triassic, which is associated with a probable
extinction event at about 200 million years ago.
●● Conodonts are diverse and evolved many species, some of which had
quite short geological ranges, making them very useful in biostratigraphy.
However, even though the conodont elements were discovered in the
mid-1800s, we still didn’t know what conodonts actually were.
Foraminifera
●● Oxygen isotopes data gained from forams have provided us with insights
into the climate change in the most recent era of Earth’s history, the
Cenozoic, which runs from the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago
to the present day.
72 Introduction to Paleontology
●● That is the picture from the Cenozoic, but can we take this back any further
in time? This is just what Dr. Brian Huber of the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of Natural History’s Department of Paleobiology has been doing—
pushing the record of temperature changes back 120 million years, well
into the last period of the Mesozoic era, the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs
still ruled the land.
●● One of the reasons Dr. Huber can make this trip back in time is due to
the nature of the geological materials that he samples. One of the largest
depositories of Earth’s sediments, forams, and therefore climatic records,
are the oceans. But oceans are continually being opened up at mid-
oceanic ridges and destroyed at subduction zones, destroying or altering
the record such that sensitive isotopic information is lost.
●● Dr. Huber’s research shows that warming started at 65.9 million years
ago. This trend began just before the impact occurred at Chicxulub.
This temperature increase reversed a long, slow cooling that had been
progressing throughout the Late Cretaceous. Forams don’t record any
major extinction throughout this interval of time.
●● Forams appear to be doing fine before the impact occurred, but after
it, they register a 90% extinction of the group. For forams, it was likely
darkness that would be the killer. Fine ash and soot thrown high into the
atmosphere would cut off the Sun and shut down photosynthesis both in
the oceans and on the land. And once the food-web support was removed,
the Mesozoic biosphere collapsed.
74 Introduction to Paleontology
extinction events. This is in part due to their shear abundance when
compared to large (macro) fossils. This abundance also allows us to
investigate some of the fundamental processes of evolution, an opportunity
that was taken up by Dr. Gene Hunt of the Department of Paleobiology at
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
●● Dr. Hunt studies ostracods, tiny crustaceans that are typically around 1
millimeter in size. They secrete a bivalved organic or calcareous shell and
are found from the Ordovician period to the present day.
●● It is in part this question that Dr. Hunt has been trying to answer using
ostracods. Does evolution occur in a gradual linear manner, often called
phyletic gradualism, or does evolution progress in a series of rapid pulses
separated by periods of apparent stasis with little change? The latter is a
hypothesis proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972
that they called punctuated equilibrium.
●● Random walks are very rarely completely random. There will often be a
bounding wall, which will prevent a certain feature from varying above
or below a particular value. For example, consider the size of ostracods.
Although they are very small, there will be a size below which it would be
impossible for these little crustaceans to exist, bounded by such things as
the functional size of organs or the ability to efficiently respire.
Questions to consider:
1. Why are microfossils so valuable in correlating rocks (biostratigraphy)
and in elucidating environmental change in the oceans?
2. Why are microfossils the oldest fossils we will likely ever find?
Suggested Reading:
Armstrong and Brasier, Microfossils.
Knell, The Great Fossil Enigma.
76 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture Ocean Fire and the Origin of
10 Life
T
his lecture will examine an intriguing hypothesis regarding
the origin of life, and ultimately the origin of the science of
paleontology, in the ocean depths. The lecture will address these
questions: How do we explore the Earth’s mid-oceanic mountain chain?
Do we have geological and paleontological evidence for ancient undersea
volcanic ecosystems? Why are oceanic volcanoes a good candidate for
life’s origins? Could life have arisen in a similar manner on other worlds?
●● As recently as the late 19th century, knowledge of the ocean was basically
restricted to the topmost few fathoms, about 18 feet. The Challenger would
perform one of the first systematic surveys of the ocean floor, using 181
miles (291 kilometers) of Italian hemp and a lead weight. On March 23,
1875, between Guam and Palau in the southwestern Pacific, the line they
tossed overboard just kept on going down, eventually recording around
4475 fathoms—about 5 miles, or more than 26,000 feet, deep.
77
●● In the 1930s, Swiss physicist, inventor, and explorer Auguste Piccard,
whose first interest was the upper atmosphere, constructed pressure
spheres that he attached to high-altitude balloons to measure cosmic rays.
Later, he realized that he could modify his sphere to withstand pressure at
depth, too.
●● This mission ran at a time when the paradigm about how the world looks
and operates was changing. We now know that magma oozes up at ridges
in the ocean crust, forming new material and pushing the older oceanic
lithosphere away to either side. Continents are carried as the plates spread
away from the ridges. Ultimately, oceanic lithosphere descends into the
mantle at the ocean trenches.
●● The groundbreaking work of the Trieste would pave the way for
exploration of another feature of the newly resolved ocean floor—the
plate-generating ridges that traverse the Earth’s oceans—and with the
exploration of these features, a new possibility regarding the origin of life
would emerge, too.
78 Introduction to Paleontology
Earth’s Mid-Oceanic Mountain Chain
●● Ocean ridges produce new ocean crust, and as such, they are a hot, active,
dynamic feature of our planet. They form a chain of volcanic mountains
about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) long, rising an average of about 2.7
miles (4500 meters) above the seafloor. Although the global mid-oceanic
ridge system is mostly hidden beneath the ocean’s surface, it is the most
prominent topographic feature on the surface of our planet.
●● By the 1970s, sonar and magnetic mapping of the ocean floor had
pinpointed the location of Earth’s ocean ridge systems, but no one had
ever seen them up close. Even so, some had speculated that they might
be the site of hydrothermal activity, areas where ocean water would sink
into cracks in the newly formed crust, become heated by magmatic fluids
and the still-warm rocks, and get expelled again as hot water. These
underwater hot springs may hold the key to the origin of life on Earth.
●● We had hints of the existence of these hot springs going back as far as the
early 1880s. A Russian ship, the Vital, was sailing in the Red Sea when it
sampled water at 200 feet that appeared to be warmer than water at the
surface. The presence of hot, mineral-rich water in this area was confirmed
by later exploration. In 1965, the research vessel Atlantis II recorded water
temperatures at 133° Fahrenheit.
●● The U.S. National Science Foundation sent the research vessel Chain to
take more readings. They took sediment cores of the ocean floor. The
sediment they retrieved was bizarre—rich in metals such as copper, zinc,
and manganese. By now, the idea of spreading ocean floors was being
widely accepted, with the Red Sea identified as a young and newly formed
oceanic rift.
●● The hunt was on for other oceanic hydrothermal sites. In 1972, a promising
site in the Galapagos rift zone was selected by the presence of hot
water found on earlier expeditions and was explored by the research
vessel Thomas Washington. Robotic and submarine-mounted cameras
recorded curious mounds encrusted with minerals around 15 to 75 feet
●● In 1977, the DSV ALVIN visited the Galapagos rift. In addition to finding
hydrothermal vents, they also found a rich and bizarre biological
community. The inhabitants included mussels and white clams, some more
than a foot long, and bacteria-laden beard worms, many times larger than
their shallow-water relatives, that covered the lava rock.
●● Something other than the Sun must be powering life down here. The water
collected by ALVIN contained hydrogen sulfide, which is produced by
primitive microscopic microbes called archaea living in and on the hot rocks
and sediments. They take sulfate that occurs in seawater and reduce it by
chemically removing oxygen, producing energy and releasing hydrogen
sulfide as a waste product. Higher organisms feed on archaea, making this a
chemosynthetic-based ecosystem rather than a photosynthetic-based one.
●● The seawater starts to alter, and get altered by, minerals present in the
surrounding rocks. The altered seawater is then expelled as a superheated
metal-rich brine through hydrothermal vents, such as so-called black
smokers. These volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits are important
sources of ores containing copper, zinc, lead, gold, and silver. But these
metal sulfides are not the only indicators of these ancient ecosystems; we
also find whole fossilized vent communities.
80 Introduction to Paleontology
●● One of the oldest fossil vent systems we currently have comes from
northeastern China. In 2007, an ancient Precambrian community was
described by Jiang-Hai Li of Peking University and Timothy Kusky of
Saint Louis University, who discovered evidence of a volcanogenic
massive sulfide deposit dating to 1.43 billion years ago—well before the
diversification of multicellular creatures. These sections preserved some
of the black smoker hydrothermal vent chimneys, just like the ones we find
under the ocean today.
●● Given that the oldest vent fossils we find are much younger than those
at Strelley Pool in western Australia, why are scientists still so keen on
hydrothermal vents as the location for the origin of life?
●● There are a lot of raw materials—all those metals to act as catalysts for the
generation of useful organics—in these hydrothermal pressure cookers.
And it appears that the last universal common ancestor of living things
today was an extreme thermophile, a microbe that liked the heat, just like
we find in modern oceanic hydrothermal settings.
●● Our job now is to come up with a hypothesis that bridges the gaps from an
inorganic environment to organic molecules to the first living cells on Earth.
Some ideas center around the production of self-replicating molecules as
a precursor for life, although probably not DNA, which requires enzymes to
reproduce themselves, which are encoded on DNA—a chicken-and-egg
scenario. Perhaps a simpler self-replicating molecule, such as RNA, was
the earliest form of life.
●● But it has also been suggested that, although hydrothermal systems are
our best bet for the location of the origin of life, perhaps we have been
looking at the wrong type of hydrothermal system. In 2000, a National
Science Foundation–funded project found an area called the Lost City in
the Atlantis Massif, 62 miles (100 kilometers) west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
They found a field of hydrothermal vents that are very different from those
sitting on the spreading ridges.
82 Introduction to Paleontology
●● The rocks of both hydrothermal systems also possess an interesting
microstructure: tiny pockets where organic chemistry could be concentrated
and perhaps develop other features, such as a cell membrane. At a certain
point in time, these primitive cells may have become sufficiently resilient to
leave the vent system and start to populate the ocean.
Other Worlds
●● Vent discoveries have also opened up possibilities for the search for life
elsewhere in our solar system. In particular, astrobiologists are interested in
moons like Europa, which orbits Jupiter, and Enceladus, which orbits Saturn.
●● It is thought that Europa may have a liquid water ocean below its icy crust
that would massage the interior of the planet, generating heat and perhaps
allowing for the existence of hydrothermal vents, around which life might
Questions to consider:
1. Is plate tectonics a vital component of planets that might develop life?
2. On how many other worlds might life have started in our solar system?
Suggested Reading:
Corfield, The Silent Landscape.
Knoll, Life on a Young Planet.
84 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture The Ancient Roots of
11 Biodiversity
A
lthough we have likely had life on Earth for around 4 billion years,
the spectacular biosphere we see all around us today may be
relatively new. This lecture will examine how we get the first
indications of a diverse biosphere. What was Darwin’s dilemma? What
are the first stirrings of an enlarged biosphere? How would these new
organisms develop? Why did this first explosion of life occur, and what
happened to it?
Darwin’s Dilemma
●● Darwin was well aware that fossils were useful indicators of past life and
ecosystems but also understood that the record was incomplete. Even
so, the fossil record should still demonstrate increasing complexity from
simple forms following the Early Precambrian dawn of the last universal
common ancestor to the more complex biosphere we have today.
●● There was a problem, though: Close to the base of the Cambrian period,
today dated around 542 million years ago, the fossil record appears
to indicate that a diverse array of large, complex creatures apparently
materialized out of thin air. This appearance occurred even though life
appeared to follow Darwin’s predictions after the Cambrian period. This
emergence of a complex biosphere geologically in an instant was contrary
to what Darwin had predicted.
85
●● Darwin suggested that as paleontological exploration continued, simpler
fossil forms would likely turn up in older strata, but for a while this was
a problem. Today, we are aware that Darwin’s dilemma is related, in part,
to the fact that the pace of evolution did not follow the traditional “slow,
steady rate” views of the theory that many held at that time.
●● Indeed, complex life and all the major plant and animal phyla that we know
today did appear in the record rapidly. Essentially, the large biomineralized
arthropods, such as the trilobites, that we find at around 521 million years
ago, just 20 million years into the Cambrian period, arose geologically
very quickly.
●● Today, this rapid evolution of large animals is called the Cambrian explosion.
Our insights into the world’s biosphere just following this explosion of life
were greatly expanded by the discovery of an extremely important fossil
treasure—the Burgess Shale deposit in British Columbia, Canada—by one
of the Smithsonian’s most famous secretaries and director of the National
Museum of Natural History, Charles Walcott.
●● But was this the only big boom for complex life? Is it possible that there
was an earlier explosion of life, a precursor to the explosion represented in
the Burgess Shale?
A Bigger Biosphere
●● To answer that, we stay in Canada but travel to the other side of the country,
Newfoundland, which lies off the coast of eastern Canada in the Atlantic
Ocean. In 1968, at a location known as Mistaken Point, Shiva Balak Misra, a
graduate student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, discovered an
entire ancient world—an extensive ecosystem preserved on the surface
86 Introduction to Paleontology
of a series of gently dipping rocks. Many believe the exosystem to be
complete, incorporating all of the life-forms that were present at that time,
what is called a biocoenosis, or life assemblage.
●● What Misra revealed was an ancient deep ocean floor, complete with
the creatures that were living on it. The rocks are now mudstone but
were originally muddy sediments. The creatures he found living in these
deepwater, low-oxygen conditions are from the latest Precambrian on
what is now the Avalon Peninsula. At that time, this area was located
between 40° and 65° south latitude, very different from its current location
at 46.6° north.
●● The creatures found here are not like any we see today. Many of these
fossils are collectively called rangeomorphs, frond-like creatures that are
composed of simple budding elements that divide and repeat over 4 levels
of organization in a simple fractal manner. This type of reproduction is a
simple yet effective solution to build large bodies from small self-repeating
elements.
●● These, and related Ediacaran organisms, don’t have a mouth or a gut, and
some have suggested that they were osmotrophs, absorbing nutrients
and organic material directly from the seawater through their bodies. They
were certainly not photosynthetic, as they lived well below the photic zone,
the depth to which light can penetrate into water.
●● The White Sea Assemblage was named for a typical occurrence of the
assemblage found in northwestern Russia. The Russian Assemblage was
not the first group of these particular Ediacaran creatures to be found,
though. The first discovery of these creatures came from the Flinders
Ranges of Australia in an area called the Ediacara Hills. In fact, it is this
area that lends its name to this latest interval of the Precambrian: the
Ediacaran period.
●● The environment that the White Sea creatures lived in was very different
from those discovered in Newfoundland. The White Sea fossils lived on
shallow, sandy sediments in sunlit waters in temperate conditions. Storm
events occasionally smothered entire communities and preserved them
more or less in place.
88 Introduction to Paleontology
●● The second wave Ediacaran creatures still contains the frond-like
rangeomorphs that we see in Newfoundland. It is possible that
the Avalon-type assemblages still existed in the deep, dark waters
surrounding the continents, but in the second wave, there are now other
creatures, too.
●● In the Ediacaran period, there is evidence that the biosphere was no longer
static and was beginning to show glimpses of the wonderful animals that
were to follow—animals that would differentiate their bodies to perform
specialized functions and would move and interact with their environment
in a variety of diverse ways. But why did this event occur at this point in
time? What was driving the Avalon explosion?
●● Around 2.5 to 1.85 billion years ago, it is believed that the photosynthetic
bacteria had started to deliver significant quantities of oxygen to the
surface sediments, oceans, and atmosphere of the Earth system. Following
that interval, the Earth enters into a period called the boring billion between
1.85 and about 1 billion years ago, where nothing much appears to change
in the Earth’s geochemical or biological systems.
●● But what happened to the Ediacarans? At the end of the Ediacaran period,
there is a large shift in carbon isotopes recorded in the geological record.
With each of the 5 mass extinctions, starting with the extinction at the
end of Ordovician about 443 million years ago, a similar perturbation is
recorded and often relates to a severe disruption in the biosphere.
90 Introduction to Paleontology
aided in their preservation. With the advent of more sophisticated grazing
and burrowing organisms, the unique conditions that preserved these
creatures ended and, with it, the record of the Ediacarans. But there is
another possibility: one that evokes a replacement of the Ediacarans by
other animals.
●● Whatever their fate, by the time we see the first large fauna of the
Cambrian, the Ediacarans are gone, either suddenly or gradually replaced
by other creatures. The putative ancestors of later organisms are gone,
too, their ancestors evolving into the wonderful creatures from the
Cambrian explosion.
Suggested Reading:
Erwin and Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion.
Fedonkin, Gehling, Grey, Narbonne, and Vickers-Rich, The Rise of Animals.
92 Introduction to Paleontology
Lecture Arthropod Rule on Planet
12 Earth
T
he Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of Natural History has had a long and important association
with the study of fossil arthropods. This lecture will examine some
of the past history and collections, as well as some of the current research
that is being undertaken on this extremely important group of animals. In
this lecture, you will learn about the origins of the arthropods and how our
perception of arthropods would change after the explosion of life.
93
deposited in shallow tidal waters around 555 million years ago during the
Late Precambrian Ediacaran period.
●● One of the members of this diverse, and sometimes strange, fauna of the
Ediacaran Hills is a wormlike fossil called Spriggina, named for Reginald
Sprigg, who discovered the Ediacaran fauna in 1946. Spriggina was around
1 to 2 inches (3 to 5 centimeters) long and appears to be segmented,
supplied with rows of plates along its back. In addition, unlike many other
creatures in the Ediacaran fauna, it has an obvious head, or cephalon, not
unlike the head shields we find in trilobites, which are definitive arthropods
occurring later during the Cambrian period.
94 Introduction to Paleontology
●● Another contender for the arthropod ancestor from this time is
Parvancorina, which has also been compared to trilobites. This is a fairly
simple creature with a shield-like body and blunt head. It is bilaterally
symmetrical, but no segments or limbs have been found.
●● In total, Walcott would recover more than 65,000 specimens that he would
faithfully record, extract, and return to the Smithsonian, forming one of the
most important collections of Cambrian fossils in the world. Although its
full importance was not really realized until the 1970s, Walcott’s discovery
sheds light on an incredible ecosystem—a world that had recently gone
through the Cambrian explosion and that would see the relatively simple
animals from the Ediacaran diversify into all the body plans of animals we
see today.
●● By the time of the Burgess Shale at 510 million years ago, an entire suite
of arthropods is present, with most of the major arthropod subgroups
represented—not only here, but in all of the other Burgess-type sites
around the world.
●● But there are also some odd arthropod-like creatures associated with
our Burgess arthropods. One is the Tyrannosaurus rex of the Cambrian
oceans: Anomalocaris, some specimens of which from China are up to 6
feet long. The giant limbs in front of this creatures were used to capture
and hold its prey.
●● The creature was enormous, about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length, but rather
than the fierce predator from the Cambrian, Aegirocassis benmoulae
appeared to have its front appendages modified for filter feeding, probably
swimming through the ocean filtering microplankton.
96 Introduction to Paleontology
while lower flaps are the equivalent of the lower walking limb branch
(called the endopodite) of modern arthropods.
●● The discovery that they possessed 2 flaps on their segments and not one
and that those 2 flaps were separate and not branched put them on a
stem leading to what some call the Euarthropoda, or true arthropods. They
represent a stage before the fusion of exopodite and endopodite into the
modern arthropod biramous limb we see today.
●● In other words, anomalocarids are more basal than the trilobites and
today’s arthropods. As such, the more we find out about their morphology,
the more hints we get regarding the evolution of arthropods—in this
particular case, an insight into the typical Euarthropodan biramous limb.
The Trilobites
●● Trilobites are probably some of the first animals to gaze upon the world
they lived in, as they possessed fairly sophisticated eyes. Some trilobite
even had extremely enlarged eyes.
●● Their adaptability is seen in the variety of habitats they lived in; they have
been found in virtually all marine environments, from the shallow to the
deep ocean. They were not restricted to the ocean floor, either. Some
trilobites with extremely enlarged eyes are thought to have been pelagic
floaters. Some larger forms were likely active swimmers.
●● Their diversity is also seen in the different ways in which they fed.
Important clues come from a structure on the underside of the animal
called the hypostome situated by the trilobite’s mouth. There is a whole
range of different types of hypostome, probably reflecting the different
98 Introduction to Paleontology
types of food these creatures
were scavenging or hunting.
●● Arthropods were probably some of the first animals to make the break
from the ocean to the land. Their external exoskeletons could act a bit like
a spacesuit on land, and many groups of aquatic arthropods had already
evolved limbs, placing them a step ahead of our group, the vertebrates.
We would have to turn limbs into fins through transitional forms.
Questions to consider:
1. Why are arthropods not the dominant large creatures on Earth today?
2. Could our world function without arthropods?
A
lfred Sherwood Romer was a U.S. paleontologist whose research
points to a drop in diversity in the fossil record of early tetrapods—
vertebrates that have 4 limbs—from 360 to 345 million years ago
during the first 15 million years of the Carboniferous period. Prior to the
gap, during the Late Devonian, there was an expanding population of early
tetrapods. This gap has been a matter of great debate. One explanation
is that diversity had crashed at the end of the Devonian period. In this
lecture, you will consider what happened at the boundary between the
Carboniferous and the Devonian.
●● The climate at the start of the Devonian was generally warm and dry, with
the situation getting more tropical and sometimes rainy as the Devonian
continents started to move toward the equator. During the Late Devonian,
however, there are indications of successive advances and retreats of
glacial ice at the poles.
102
shale is in part caused by the presence of the mineral pyrite that is finely
dispersed throughout the rock, but also due to its high organic content.
These sediments often give off a very characteristic rotten-egg stench,
the marker of hydrogen sulfide, and bacteria that like to live and respire in
such low-oxygen conditions. This hydrogen sulfide is also responsible for
the high pyrite content of these rocks.
●● Black shales are common in the oceans from about the Middle Devonian,
but prior to this, extensive reefs were very common in the shallow oceans
that surrounded the still-fragmented continents of the Devonian world.
An example of a spectacular Devonian reef can be found in the Canning
Basin of Australia. This reef developed during the Middle to Late Devonian,
when a shallow tropical sea covered this area of Australia. The reefs were
constructed by calcareous algae, corals, and spongelike encrusting creatures
called stromatoporoids. Reefs were much more common in the Devonian
than they are today and supported a thriving community of invertebrates.
●● But the Devonian had seen considerable innovations on land, too. The
Devonian boasts the first tetrapods that were starting to tentatively
explore the land.
●● But one of the most striking features of the Late Devonian world was the
spread of green along coastlines of the continents, perhaps extending
inland in more favorable settings. Plants were expanding their colonization
of the land.
●● Plants had made it to land earlier, during the Silurian about 430 million
years ago, but plants would remain pretty small, inauspicious, and tied to
open sources of water in those times.
●● Even by the time we get into the Early Devonian, the landscape was still
dominated by small wetland-dwelling plants. But by the early Middle
Devonian, plants had risen off the ground with the evolution of horsetaillike
forms and the beginnings of the fern lineage. But it was not until the late
Middle Devonian that the real revolution occurred, with the evolution of
●● Innovations in the plants permitted tall trees to spread across the landscape
and into highland and more inland areas, finally breaking ties with standing
water. This was the start of the greening of the Earth beyond the coastlines
and the first forests.
●● The Late Devonian was a time of change, not only in the biosphere, but also
in the state of the oceans and atmosphere. Oceanic anoxia was present in
some areas, as demonstrated by the presence of black shales in many
Late Devonian strata. There is also evidence of global cooling with the
advance of glaciers and associated sea-level changes, and it is possible
that these changes would stress the biosphere over a period of around 20
to 25 million years, producing a series of about 8 to 10 extinction pulses.
●● The earlier Kellwasser event would mostly affect marine species and in
particular the beautiful Devonian reef systems. Many invertebrate groups
that lived in and around those reefs would be severely impacted. For
●● It is the final extinction pulse, the Hangenberg event, that marks the
boundary between the Devonian and the Carboniferous periods, in which
invertebrates and many of the surviving reefs are hit again. It would also
affect both the marine and freshwater environments. It is estimated that
around 44% of the higher-level vertebrate groups are removed.
●● In total, around 19% of families and about 50% of genera would go extinct,
but the decimation was probably more severe in the oceans, with perhaps
around 22% of families dying. It is possible that around 79 to 87% of all
species in the ocean went into extinction. This extinction is referred to as
the Devonian mass extinction event.
●● What could cause all of these changes at the end of the Devonian? The
Devonian extinction is recognized as one of the big 5 mass extinctions that
have occurred during the last half a billion years on Earth.
●● All of these extinctions, with the exception of the first one at the end of
the Ordovician, have been associated with large volcanic events that
produced extensive flood basalts. It is well known that such intense
volcanic episodes can have varied effects on climate, including global
cooling and ozone destruction but also global warming.
●● There are at least 2 glacial episodes about the same time as the Kellwasser
and Hangenberg events. A cooling scenario for extinction is supported by
●● Other culprits for the Late Devonian extinctions have been suggested. It
is known that there were at least 2 impact events in the later Devonian. A
large enough impact could have serious and sudden consequences for
the biosphere.
●● Weathering would also increase rates of nutrient flux and organic delivery
to the oceans, causing vast algal blooms in the upper well-lit/oxygenated
levels of the ocean. The organic material produced in such blooms would
sink, rapidly use up available oxygen in bottom waters, and help generate
black anoxic shales and the associated positive 34S anomalies.
●● For the Hangenberg event at the end of the Devonian, Algeo suggested
that there would be a further proliferation of plants following the
development of seeds, a major innovation in plant reproduction. This
resulted in a global flora spreading to highland areas with an associated
peat accumulation and further drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide,
locking it away into the geosphere in the form of coal. Advances and
retreats in ice continued to stress the biosphere.
Questions to consider:
1. How is it possible that life itself could act as a trigger for a mass
extinction?
2. How would the Devonian determine how you put your gloves on?
Suggested Reading:
Beerling, The Emerald Planet.
Levin and King Jr, The Earth Through Time, chaps. 11–12.
A
lthough most volcanic and seismic activity occurs at plate
boundaries, not all of it does. Mantle plumes, which are thought to
develop at the core-mantle boundary, might cause volcanic activity
away from plate margins. It is possible that the development of a plume
below Siberia triggered a cascade of events that would bring all of life to
its knees in the greatest extinction this planet has ever seen. In this lecture,
you will learn about the Permian extinction.
Before Catastrophe
●● It was a world with oceans containing beautiful coral reefs, above which
would swim numerous creatures. On land, you would see plants colonizing
lowland areas.
109
●● Paleontologist Dr. Douglas Erwin in the Department of Paleobiology at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has long wrestled with
this most catastrophic event in life’s history. The end of the Permian saw
the sweeping away of many of the main players of what you could call an
old Paleozoic world, a world full of trilobites, corals, and brachiopods. As
Dr. Erwin has suggested, the Permian extinction has fundamentally shaped
the biosphere we live in today.
●● Recent research in the Karoo region of South Africa led by Michael Day of
the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and including Dr. Erwin,
has shown that around 74 to 80% of terrestrial species became extinct.
●● Due to its scale, the Permian extinction receives a lot of research attention.
As a result, our understanding of this event changes rapidly. One of the
recent updates regards the timing of Siberian Traps volcanic activity. It is still
known to be coincident with the extinction event, but it would appear that
the duration of the event was shorter and sharper than previously thought.
●● From this, they estimated that between 6300 and 7800 gigatons of sulfur,
between 3400 and 8700 gigatons of chlorine, and between 7100 and
13700 gigatons of fluorine were released to the atmosphere. If these gases
reached the upper atmosphere, they could cause significant environmental
impact. Add to this the vast amounts of carbon dioxide also produced by
the traps volcanism and you have a deadly cocktail.
●● But perhaps an even more significant product of the traps were the vast
amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that were produced.
●● Clathrates are very sensitive to temperature changes. It’s proposed that the
traps-induced warming raised ocean temperatures to the point where the
clathrates started to destabilize and release their methane, an even more
effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And although methane
oxidizes quite readily in the atmosphere, what it produces, when it does
oxidize, is more carbon dioxide.
●● At the moment, the most likely triggers of the end-Permian crisis are the
Siberian Traps and the consequences they would have on global climate.
But what were the killing mechanisms?
An Acid Nightmare
●● The team studied changes in the ratio of boron isotopes that are known
to vary with pH. Their analysis suggests a decrease of around 0.6 to 0.7
pH units during the extinction. This represents a catastrophic change for
ocean chemistry.
●● The boron acidity signal occurs about 50,000 years after the initiation of
the extinction event. They propose that the Permian-Triassic extinction
was a 2-phase event. The first pulse, over 50,000 years, was fairly slow,
as carbon dioxide was added incrementally to the Earth’s oceans and
atmosphere by the Siberian Traps.
●● It is possible that the oceans, which are pretty alkaline, were able to buffer
the carbon dioxide being dissolved in the seawater until a critical point was
reached—when a second pulse of carbon dioxide was released over a
period of about 10,000 years.
●● They suggest that this pulse released about 24,000 gigatons of carbon
dioxide at a rate of about 2.4 gigatons per year. Such a massive flush of
carbon dioxide into the Earth system would have overcome the buffering
potential of the oceans, seawater would be driven into an acidic range,
and the reef ecosystems crashed.
●● Acid rain on land would likely have caused problems for the terrestrial
ecosystem. Evidence for this has not been forthcoming, although most agree
that it is likely to have occurred. However, a team of scientists, including Mark
Sephton of Imperial College London, have found some intriguing evidence
that might act as a proxy for the acidification on soils on land.
●● Their research into the genome of this microbe points to a change that
occurred at about the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction. This change
would have permitted Methanosarcina to produce significant quantities of
methane and, as a consequence, more global warming.
●● There is another type of microbe that would likely have had serious
impacts on the biosphere, too. The Permian oceans were becoming
oxygen depleted, or anoxic. Certain microbes have a preference for
●● What was left was a decimated world, baking in a hot Sun with slow,
sluggish, poisoned oceans. The Permian extinction provides an insight
into a biosphere that ceased to function. There wasn’t any single cause
why the extinction occurred, even though there might have been an initial
trigger in the plume that rose from the core and impacted the base of the
lithosphere in Siberia.
Questions to consider:
1. Are the triggers of the Permian extinction absent in the modern world?
2. In which ways do extinctions progress—in a linear manner like a line of
dominoes or as a cascade of events?
Suggested Reading:
Erwin, Extinction.
Plummer, Carlson, and Hammersley, Physical Geology, chaps. 4 and 17.
I
n this lecture, you will examine the world of the Early Triassic just
after the end-Permian extinction and attempt to track the biosphere’s
recovery. This lecture will address several questions: What was the
world like in the Early Triassic? What was left of life following the greatest of
all extinctions? What was driving the impoverished Early Triassic, and why
did it last so long? When did the Earth start to recover? Was there more
doom at the end of the Triassic?
●● During the Early Triassic, our planet would have looked very different. A
giant landmass, Pangaea, dominated one side of a planet surrounded by the
vast Panthalassic Ocean. The Early Triassic climate was harsh on Pangaea.
Hot, arid deserts covered most of the interior of the supercontinent.
●● It is possible that this was the hottest, most arid time in more than half a
billion years. In fact, there is likely no ice at the poles. Indeed, it is possible
that the poles might have been relatively temperate places, where forests
and a more diverse biota of plants, fungi, and animals could survive.
●● This is the inverse of what we have today, because in the Early Triassic, the
temperate polar regions were more habitable than the equatorial regions.
117
●● Research in equatorial deposits from southern China, spanning the period
of the extinction at the end of the Permian and continuing into the Early
Triassic, show a rapid warming in the oceans from 21 to 36° Celsius. The
warming peaks at around 252.1 million years ago, the end of the Permian.
●● Dr. Labandeira asserts that the Permian extinction divided the history of
insects into 2 evolutionary faunas. Many Paleozoic lineages became
extinct; in fact, we lose most insect species. This is a linked plant-insect
ecological event that would have profound effects on the associations
between plants and insects.
●● But the situation on land was just half of the story. Life in the oceans had
been decimated, too. The oceans, just like the continents, were dominated
by high-abundance but low-diversity faunas. The rich invertebrate
assemblages of the pre-extinction Permian world were reduced to just
●● This is also a world with no corals. In fact, just like the coal gap on land,
there is a similar reef gap in the oceans, with coral reefs not returning to
the planet until about 9 million years after the start of the Triassic period.
●● In the oceans, fish, marine reptiles, and corals are missing. Life in these
zones tend to be invertebrates of limited diversity and stromatolites. The
situation is the same on land. The majority of the impoverished fauna that
survived the extinction at the end of the Permian retreated toward the
more hospitable poles.
●● Contrast that with the distribution of life today, where a latitudinal band
north and south of the equator shows overwhelmingly the greatest
biodiversity on the planet—a biodiversity that typically decreases as you
move toward the poles.
●● It appears that the increase in lethal temperatures during the Early Triassic,
especially at equatorial latitudes, pushed organisms beyond their thermal
tolerances and were responsible for driving this period of extremely low
biodiversity. But isn’t this just what we should expect? After all, we have just
come through the largest mass extinction ever, at the end of the Permian.
●● While it would obviously take time for the Earth to cool down and recover,
in most extinctions, the biosphere is well on the way to recovery within
hundreds of thousands of years. For the Permian extinction, however,
things were still pretty awful up to 5 to 7 million years into the Triassic. In
fact, the only reason why another mass extinction is not registered at this
time is that there is very little life on the planet left to go extinct.
●● It is important to note, though, that it was not just rising temperature that
was the problem. Increased temperature had caused a whole cascade of
related problems during the Permian extinction—problems that persisited
well into the Triassic. These difficulties included reduced oxygen conditions
in various parts of the oceans and the possibility of an associated rise in
hydrogen sulfide, due to the proliferation of certain sulfur-loving bacteria
that like to live in these oxygen-poor conditions.
●● Increases in carbon dioxide levels would also mean more dissolved dioxide
levels in the oceans, making seawater acidic. This would ensure that
creatures that secrete thick calcium carbonate shells and skeletons, such
as corals, would have a long wait before they could make a comeback.
●● Eventually, though, through the Middle and Late Triassic, in both the
continental and marine realms, the numbers and diversities of lineages
started to increase significantly. In addition, there is evidence of more
complex ecological associations developing.
●● For example, by the time we get into the Middle Triassic, we start to see
long-term reef development initiated again. In addition, there is a quantum
leap in plant-insect activity commencing during the Middle Triassic and
expanding, especially throughout the Late Triassic. Innovative interactions
between different life-forms were starting to increase, and food webs—
an important engine in the evolution of new species and increasing
biodiversity—were becoming more complex.
●● The Middle Triassic also sees the spread of mollusks, such as bivalves
(clams) and gastropods (snails). In addition, the Middle Triassic to Early
Jurassic interval would see the expansion of terrestrial and freshwater
vertebrate faunas. An early example is the rise of archosaurs, which, by
the mid-Triassic, had started to replace the mammal-like therapsid reptiles.
●● It is likely that some of the earliest mammals had evolved by the Late
Triassic from some of those mammal-like therapsid reptiles that had been
so common in the Permian and Early Triassic.
●● But as encouraging as this explosion of life in the later Triassic may sound,
there would be another setback before the flourishing of the dinosaur
world we recognize today. At the end of the Triassic, at around 201.3 million
years ago, an event called the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction occurred—
the fourth extinction in the big 5 mass extinctions.
●● In the oceans, the conodonts that had been such an important part of
the Paleozoic fauna would be extinguished. Reef systems would suffer
once again, and ammonites, brachiopods, and bivalves all would suffer
significant extinctions. In total, it is estimated that 22% of all marine families,
53% of all genera, and an estimated 76 to 84% of all species would be
driven into extinction.
●● It is possible that falling sea levels could have caused the crisis. This would
have reduced the area of shallow, warm seas and restricted the spread
of reefs. But the reason for these sea-level changes is uncertain at the
moment.
●● The rift that would eventually widen to form the Atlantic Ocean was a center
of igneous activity. Huge volumes of hot magma were being intruded into
this area of Pangean crust at the end of the Triassic period about 200
●● Such vast volcanic activity could have caused the effects of the Permian-
Triassic extinction: global cooling due to the release of sulfur dioxide and
aerosols, followed by intense warming as carbon dioxide levels started
to rise in the atmosphere. Such warming may have also caused the
destabilization and dissociation of gas hydrates in sediments on the ocean
floor, thereby releasing methane and causing even more global warming.
●● Currently, CAMP and possibly sea-level changes are the best explanations
for the Triassic-Jurassic extinction. However, there has been a suggestion
that the decrease in diversity was caused more by a decrease in speciation
than by an increase in extinction. This decrease in speciation is a kind of
slowing down of the engine of biodiversity, with normal rates of extinction
not being met by a similar rate of new species evolving.
●● The world following the Triassic would see a glorious new ecosystem
dawn. The Jurassic is sometimes considered the golden age of the
dinosaurs, but to many paleontologists, it was a golden age of life—a life
that had been proven through earlier, very trying times in Earth’s history.
Suggested Reading:
Levin and King Jr, The Earth Through Time, chaps. 13–14.
Sues and Fraser, Triassic Life on Land.
N
ew fossils are continually pushing paleobiological research
forward, and our insights into ancient creatures are only going to
become clearer as new discoveries are made. In this lecture, you
will discover how dinosaurs become fossils and how they are found. You
will also learn about the 2 broad groups of dinosaurs. In addition, you will
learn who first discovered the Spinosaurus, why it was puzzling, why it was
a “lost dinosaur” for many years, and why it is special.
●● There are many factors that have to come together for a living organism
to become a fossil. One of the most important is, in most but not all cases,
to cover the carcass of the organism with sediments as soon as possible.
This effectively gets it out of the way of scavengers and, preferably, into
conditions where oxygen levels may be sufficiently low to help slow decay.
This increases the chances that the processes of fossilization may occur
and preserve some of the organism.
●● This explains why the majority of fossils that are found are from aquatic
environments and why the majority of dinosaur fossils are from rocks that
were deposited in sediments in, or close to, rivers and lakes. So, for a
dinosaur to maximize its chance of becoming a fossil, it really needs to be
125
close to one of these environments when it dies. One notable exception is
if dinosaurs gets caught in volcanic ashfall or mudflows deposits.
We also need rocks of the right type. These rocks need to be terrestrial
and not marine, and they most likely need to be rocks deposited in
or near rivers or lakes, although there are notable exceptions, such as
volcanic deposits.
●● The earliest dinosaurs, in the Late Triassic, were bipedal, but they were not
the terrifying meat-eating giants that would evolve later in the Mesozoic.
Dinosaurs would evolve and diversify throughout the Mesozoic, producing
a variety of forms and, in general, demonstrating an increase in size
through their evolutionary history. Dinosaurs are only very rarely found to
evolve into smaller sizes, and the average weight of a Mesozoic dinosaur
was about 100 kilograms.
●● Dinosaurs can be split into 2 broad groups and are generally differentiated
on the basis of the structure of the pelvis.
In the group of dinosaurs called Saurischia, also called the lizard-hipped
dinosaurs, the pubis bone points forward. This group of dinosaurs
includes the 2-legged theropod dinosaurs (such as Tyrannosaurus rex)
and the sauropod dinosaurs (such as Diplodocus).
Spinosaurus
●● They discovered a single dark-colored tooth that was quite distinctive, with
2 sharp edges on the front and back called carinas that exhibit serrations.
●● But the particular theropod tooth that was found in Malaysia had very
specific ridges running down its length and micro-ornamentation on its
surface. The tooth was also quite conical in shape. These features are
indicative of a particular type of theropod dinosaur: a spinosaur.
●● Even though it was an incomplete skeleton, it was certainly unlike any other
large theropod dinosaur the world had seen before. It had a unique long,
narrow, crocodile-like jaw. Its teeth were conical, not blade-like, and rising
off its back vertebrae were enormous spines, which might have supported
a large sail, perhaps for use in display or thermoregulation.
●● The spinosaur was only one of at least 2 other large theropod dinosaurs,
including Bahariasaurus and Carcharodontosaurus, that were around
40 feet (12 meters) long. This just didn’t make sense: How could such
an ecosystem support so many large apex predators living in such close
proximity? This became known as Stromer’s riddle.
●● The story of Stromer’s remarkable dinosaur takes a rather sad turn during
World War II. The spinosaur remains, along with many other specimens from
his expeditions, were proudly displayed at the Bavarian State Collection
for Paleontology and Geology in Munich, southern Germany. On April 24
●● All that remained of Stromer’s spinosaur were some of his notes and
sketches. Even the photographic records of the spinosaur were lost, only
turning up in 1995 in a collection of Stromer’s records donated to the
museum by his son.
●● They are still puzzling. They all have elongated crocodile-like skulls with
conical teeth and spines along their back that likely supported a sail. The
crocodile-like skull suggests that part of the diet of this group of dinosaurs
consisted of fish. This opens up an interesting possibility: This could be the
only known predatory dinosaur that spent at least some of its life in water.
●● Oxygen occurs in both light oxygen-16 and heavy oxygen-18 forms. Land-
dwelling creatures lose a lot of water through breathing and evaporation,
and it is the light form of water that contains the oxygen-16 that gets
evaporated. As a result, it is the heavy oxygen-18 that is concentrated in
tooth enamel.
●● Aquatic animals lose less water than terrestrial creatures and, as such,
have less oxygen-18 in their teeth. Aquatic creatures also drink more and
are constantly flushing water through their bodies, keeping the oxygen-18
levels low.
●● For his Ph.D. research at University College Dublin in Ireland, Nizar Ibrahim
was studying all of the fauna in the Kem Kem beds in Morocco. These are
Late Cretaceous sediments deposited between 100 to 94 million years
ago. From a fossil found in Erfoud, Morocco, that is the same species as
Stromer’s spinosaur—Spinosaurus aegypticus—Ibrahim, along with Samir
●● If this is the case, it also helps us solve Stromer’s riddle: How could the giant
Spinosaurus live alongside other giant theropod dinosaurs? If Spinosaurus
is semiaquatic, they would be living in a different environment and mostly
preying on aquatic rather than terrestrial organisms.
Questions to consider:
1. Given the success of the dinosaurs, why are their fossils not more
common?
2. Are the anatomical and ecological questions about Spinosaurus now
answered?
Suggested Reading:
Lanham, The Bone Hunters.
Pim, Dinosaurs.
I
n this lecture, you will learn about the fantastic evolutionary journey of
the group of mammals known as whales and the incredible diversity
that can result from natural selection in an instant of geological time.
This lecture will address several questions: Why would creatures that
evolved on land move back into the ocean? Which group of mammals
would start the whales along a path to the ocean? And how can we explain
the wonderful paleontological treasure at Cerro Ballena?
●● But why make the move back into the water? Vertebrates had to overcome
several difficulties in leaving the oceans and adopting a life on land, including
how to obtain oxygen from air rather than water, develop a more robust
skeleton that would make up for the buoyancy effects that would no longer
be enjoyed on land, accommodate hearing in a gas environment rather than
a liquid one, and develop limbs rather than fins for getting around.
133
●● Despite all the challenges vertebrates faced, and adaptations they evolved
in making the break for land, some of them returned to the water—some so
completely that they can no longer survive on land. But why?
Whale Evolution
●● Genetically, we know that whales fall into a group of mammals called the
even-toed ungulates, or the artiodactyls. The Artiodactyla include familiar
modern animals, such as pigs, camels, giraffes, and deer, but the closest
land-living relatives of the whales today is the hippopotamus.
●● This is not suggesting that Whales evolved from hippos; rather, they share
a common ancestor somewhere in the biosphere’s deep past. Who is the
best paleontological candidate for this common ancestor? To answer this
question, we need to roll back the clock to around 54 million years ago,
about 12 million years after the death of the dinosaurs, during the Early
Eocene and in a region of the planet defined by the Tethys Sea.
●● The Eocene world had started to look a little more like the planet we know
today, with familiar-looking continents and a widening Atlantic Ocean.
Australia was still connected to Antarctica, and India was starting to collide
with Asia, building the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas.
●● If Indohyus, or a creature very much like it, gave rise to the whales, who
is the first true member of the whale lineage, the cetaceans? Pakicetus
is, so far, the oldest member of the cetaceans for which we have fossil
evidence. We are now around 50 million years before present, and the
small herbivorous “deer” from which whales evolved has grown to about
6.6 feet long, and this creature has also developed a taste for meat.
●● Pakicetus lived on the shores of the Tethys Sea in what is now northern
Pakistan. It lived in a freshwater floodplain environment but was likely a
●● This creature still doesn’t resemble modern whales, but in addition to the
whalelike features already present in Indohyus, Pakicetus is starting to
develop an elongate whalelike head.
●● The Protocetidae
are much more
whalelike, with
the possibility of
the development
of a fluke,
a 2-lobed
tail, in some
species and the
migration of the
nasal openings
to the top of
the skull. For
species of the
Protocetidae,
which may have still been semiaquatic, moving around on land would not
have been graceful, probably akin to the way modern seals move today.
●● Whales are broadly divided into 2 groups, toothed whales and the baleen
whales, who share a common ancestor about 34 million years ago.
Toothed whales are characterized by having teeth, and they hunt using
echolocation by making a series of clicks at various frequencies. They
range in size from the tiny 4.5-foot vaquita to the sperm whale, which
can range in size from 33 to 66 feet in length.
The baleen whales gulp large volumes of water and sieve out krill,
small fish, and other microplankton by squeezing the water back out
through their baleen plates, a substance composed of a protein similar
to human fingernails. Humpbacks are a popular favorite with whale
watchers, but another species of baleen, the blue whale, is possibly the
largest animal that has ever lived, at almost 100 feet long.
Cerro Ballena
●● By the time we examine the whales at a fossil site in the Atacama Desert
of Chile called Cerro Ballena, at around 6 to 9 million years ago, modern-
looking whales had already evolved from the dorudontids back in the
Eocene. A whole range of marine mammals are found at the site, but the
fossil baleen whales are probably the most spectacular.
●● Other features of this fossil deposit have helped unravel this mystery. First,
these creatures were stranded on a tidal flat, roughly orthogonal to current
flow. The whales are also preserved belly up, suggesting that they died
at sea and then washed to shore. In addition, high concentrations of iron
in the sediments hint at a high algal concentration in the waters in which
these animals were swimming.
●● Our story likely starts with rainfall over the Andes, flushing minerals rich in
iron into the Pacific Ocean. This in turn causes a bloom of algae and the
death of many marine mammals and fish. A high tide would help wash the
animals ashore onto a mudflat, all belly up as decomposing gases start to
swell the gut. The ocean hydrodynamically aligned them into neat rows,
producing a stranding, just as we find in modern whale strandings today.
Suggested Reading:
Carwardine, Smithsonian Handbooks.
Thewissen, The Walking Whales.
F
lowering plants, the angiosperms, have had an important role to
play in Earth’s transformation beyond an aesthetic one. In providing
fruits and cereal crops, they have also helped drive the evolution
of human civilization. They are a remarkable part of our biosphere. In
this lecture, you will discover what Earth was like before flowers, where
and when flowers evolved, how the angiosperms dominated, and how
angiosperms and animals were partners in the great floral takeover.
●● The first evidence of plants growing on the land comes from the Silurian
period, about 433 million years ago, with fossils of simple plants living on
water-clogged floodplains. Fossils interpreted as the reproductive spores
from these simple plants have been reported from the Ordovician period,
about 470 million years ago, but these finds are still controversial.
●● By the time we get to the Devonian, plants are invading drier landscapes,
and by the Late Devonian, there is an incredible innovation: the development
of the seed. This, along with other important developments, such as leaves,
wood, and true roots, would finally allow plants to break ties with the water’s
edge and spread even farther into the centers of the continents.
●● Various seed ferns would flourish throughout the rest of the Late Paleozoic,
and the vast forests of the Upper Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) are
responsible for the coal in the Northern Hemisphere that would ultimately
power the Industrial Revolution.
141
●● Seed ferns would flourish into the Triassic and even continue into the
Cenozoic, but it would be the gymnosperms, such as conifers, cycads, and
an array of ginkgo-like plants (Bennettitales and gnetophytes), that would
really start to advance across the Mesozoic world.
●● Interesting evidence
of early plant-insect
relationships in the
gymnosperms has come
from the chemical analyses
of the fossil mid-Mesozoic
proboscis of kalligrammatid
lacewings. Pollen was found
associated with the specimens’
●● Dr. Labandeira, and colleagues in France and Spain, have found additional
evidence of an early insect-plant pollination relationship from the Lower
Cretaceous (110 to 115 million years ago) of the Basque region of Spain.
Trapped in amber are small insects called thrips or thunderbugs.
●● Modern molecular phylogeny has also revealed a plant that is at the base
of the angiosperm family tree. This plant represents the most primitive
flowering plant that still exists on the planet today: Amborella, the only
remaining species of the family Amborellaceae, is found on the island of
Grande-Terre of New Caledonia, in the South Pacific.
●● Given its basal status, it would seem the tropical upland forest setting
of Amborella would be a good candidate for the environment in which
angiosperms evolved. The problem, despite its primitive status, is
a complete lack of fossils of a similar plant early in the evolution of the
angiosperms.
Flower Power
●● Around 100 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous, there was a
great radiation in angiosperm diversity initially noted in the fossil record
by angiosperm leaf and pollen remains. By the Late Cretaceous, flowering
plants started to take over environments that were formerly dominated by
ferns, cycads, Bennettitales, and other gymnosperms.
●● Expanding into the dry interiors of continents may also explain why their
fossil record is so poor at this time, as arid upland areas are erosive
regions that are likely susceptible to wildfire events and thus difficult areas
for fossils to form.
●● The sole purpose of a flower is reproduction, and in the vast number of cases,
that means reproduction where the male gametes (pollen) are transferred
from one plant to another by insects. It is possible that this relationship,
and therefore the first flowers, evolved in isolated settings such as islands
or an island chain, which might also explain their apparent very-sudden
appearance in the fossil record. Such isolated settings may have allowed
for the development of a specialized relationship between a plant and an
animal—for example, a wasp carrying pollen from one plant to another.
●● But pollination via insects was not a new gig, as various insects had been
aiding the pollination of gymnosperms before the widespread appearance
of flowering plants. It is likely that some insects were preadapted to build
this relationship with angiosperms. The angiosperms, though, would take
insect—in fact, animal—pollination to a whole new level in a classic example
of how 2 major groups of organisms would co-associate over time.
Pollination
●● Most of the fossil and phylogenetic evidence indicates that the earliest
flowers were small and bowl-shaped, not showy. There were some,
though, that would have stood out in the Cretaceous landscape. Some of
the first true flowers of the Cretaceous may have resembled something like
magnolias. These flowers likely only had a pollen reward for their insect
pollinators; the pollinators themselves were likely generalist in nature, such
as beetles, short-tongued wasps, and flies.
●● The end result of this radiation of the angiosperms during the Cretaceous
would be a world with a radically different flora, and companion insect
associates to match.
Questions to consider:
1. Why were flowers an “abominable mystery” to Charles Darwin?
2. Are insects the only animals to have a special relationship with flowers?
Suggested Reading:
Benton and Harper, Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record,
chap. 18.
Goulson, A Sting in the Tale.
G
rasses, which are angiosperms (flowering plants), make up the
most economically significant plant family today. They include
cereal crops, such as maize, wheat, rice, and barley. Some are
used as construction materials (bamboo), while others are fermented to
make ethanol biofuels (sugar cane). Altogether, it is estimated that there are
probably around 10,000 species of grass. In this lecture, you will consider
whether grass is a new plant, when the great grass takeover occurred,
what triggered the spread of our grassy planet, and how significant grasses
have been on the evolution of animals.
Grasses
●● Until recently, the general mantra regarding the evolution of grass was that
the first grasses evolved long after the dinosaurs had become extinct at 66
million years ago. The oldest fossil grass came from Tennessee, dated to
about 55 million years ago.
●● There were hints of earlier grasses from fossil pollen, but grass pollen
is very difficult to tell apart from non–grass pollen. As such, images of
dinosaurs striding through grass were generally regarded as incorrect
renderings of the Mesozoic world.
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●● On analyzing the phytoliths, phytolith expert Caroline Strömberg at the
University of Washington identified them as coming from various grasses,
representing at least 5 species. This is significant, because in addition
to showing that they existed at the time of the dinosaurs, the phytoliths
demonstrated that grass species in the Late Cretaceous had already
diversified. This means that the antiquity of grass was a lot longer than
anyone had suspected. Strömberg has suggested that this may have
pushed back the origin of grass to about 100 million years ago.
●● Dr. Poinar and his colleagues found a beautifully preserved grass floret
preserved in amber, and on its tip is an extinct species of parasitic fungus
called Palaeoclaviceps parasiticus that is likely closely related to a group
of fungi that today we call ergot. Ergot may have a special relationship with
grass. It tastes bitter and would deter grazing by herbivores. If an animal
ingests enough of it, it can cause serious side effects, such as trembling
muscle groups that cause an animal to fall over.
●● There are many different types of grassland. There are the savannas and
velds of Africa. In North America, there are the prairies. In South America
are the pampas and llanos, and in Eurasia are the steppes.
●● Today, grasslands cover 40% of all our planet’s land surface. Because
grasses are mostly annual plants that die every year, they develop large
and deep soil profiles.
●● Grasslands are generally associated with dry but not desert conditions.
Because of their high rate of turnover, grasses and grasslands can support
a large animal population, unlike trees and shrubs of forests, where a lot of
the useful nutrient-rich material is locked up in the plant.
Savanna Grassland
●● But by the time we move into to the Oligocene, 23 to 5.3 million years
ago, this desert scrub starts to give way to grasses and their deep, loamy
soil profiles. By the Late Oligocene, we have evidence of the grassland
biome and an association of grassland-adapted mammals spreading
across North America.
●● Around 95% of land plants, and some grasses, use what is called the C3
metabolic pathway, a form of photosynthesis that probably evolved in
the Paleozoic. Many grasses, and some other plants, use a C4 metabolic
pathway. Because of their anatomy, some C4 plants can operate at lower
levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than C3 plants can.
●● Because C4 plants don’t need as much carbon dioxide, they can afford
to keep their stoma (surface pores that allow for gas exchange between
the plant and the atmosphere) closed more often than C3 plants can.
This means that in dry conditions, plants like C4 grasses have a selective
advantage. This makes them perfect plants for arid conditions and for the
spread of grasslands.
●● There were probably other mechanisms that played a role in the spread
of the C4 grasses, too. For example, an increase in charcoal in Pacific
cores between 12 and 7 million years ago hints at a greater number of fires
during this period. This would favor grasses and grasslands due to their
rapid recovery rates when compared to trees and shrubs.
●● This thrust vast amounts of rock up into the atmosphere, which led to the
rocks starting to weather. A part of the weathering process involves the
transformation of rock silicates into clays by the action of carbon dioxide
dissolved in rainwater. In this way, carbon dioxide is effectively washed
from the atmosphere, transported down river systems in the form of clay,
and deposited as a sediment, causing an overall net drawdown of carbon
dioxide.
●● How has the evolution of a relatively new ecosystem, the grassland biome,
impacted the rest of the biosphere? A traditional view, for more than 140
years, was that the evolution of mammals with high-crowned, or hypsodont,
teeth was in response to the spread of phytolith grasses. These large teeth
would be an adaptation to eating the gritty grasses, and as such, you could
use the presence of hypsodont teeth as a morphological proxy for the
presence of grasslands.
●● But even if the story of teeth evolution in our grazing mammals is not quite
nailed down yet, there is certainly a case for co-association, or perhaps
coevolution, between grasses and animals. The snout of many creatures
became broader and flatter to allow for effective grazing, and jaws became
longer and deeper, permitting more efficient grinding of plant material.
●● Grass may have also had an effect on the evolution of humans. The spread
of grasslands was proposed by some as a reason why our ancestors started
to walk upright. A very significant part of the human story evolved on the
open grasslands; this is probably the environment that shaped us the most.
The presence of the grassland biome may have also helped genus Homo
move out of the cradle in Africa and start to populate the planet.
Suggested Reading:
Emling, The Fossil Hunter.
Savage, Prairie.
I
n 1926, explorer W. Douglas Burden traveled to Komodo Island, just
west of the island of Flores in Indonesia, where he discovered the
world’s largest predatory lizard: the Komodo dragon. He returned
with 12 specimens, 2 of them live and 3 of them stuffed and displayed
in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Today, the
Komodo dragon, an endangered species, is being held from the brink of
extinction in part by the efforts of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1992, the
Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park was one of the first zoos outside of
Indonesia to hatch clutches of dragons, with various hatchings distributed
to zoos around the world.
Komodo Dragons
●● These are big animals; an average male is around 2.5 meters long and
weighs about 91 kilograms. It is estimated that they have a life span of
around 30 years. They have a long muscular tail that is as long as the
body and a long flat crocodile-like head with a rounded snout. They
have powerful front limbs and long curved claws, which are formidable
weapons, and a long forked yellow tongue that flicks in and out of the
dragon’s mouth. Their skin is armored with osteoderm bone, forming a kind
of chain mail pattern.
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●● Despite their position as top predator of these islands, they will quite
happily eat carrion. The dragons will hunt almost anything: invertebrates,
eggs, lizards, and mammals, including monkeys, goats, water buffalo,
and other items. They are not fussy eaters and will on occasion eat other
Komodo dragons. Attacks on humans have also been reported.
●● Komodo dragons are not designed to run down prey like wolves do. In
common with other reptiles of this genus, they have legs that stick out to
the side, giving them a characteristic gait, with their body swaying from
side to side.
●● They are ambush predator, using short bursts of speed to quickly lunge at a
creature and strike. Small prey tend to get bitten in the middle of the neck,
sometimes even being knocked over by a swipe from that powerful tail.
For larger prey, they adopt a bite-and-retreat strategy, critically wounding a
larger creature and then waiting for it to die.
●● A common hypothesis is that Komodo dragons kill their prey with the aid of
virulent strains of bacteria found in their mouths. It is presumed that the bite
from the dragon infects its prey with so much bacteria including that they
go into septic shock and die as a result.
●● So, if it doesn’t use “dirty mouths” or powerful jaws, how does the Komodo
dragon kill its prey? They have strong muscles behind their skull to resist
●● Komodo dragons can see objects about 300 meters (985 feet) away but
have difficulty distinguishing between nonmoving objects. They also have
rather poor night, or dim-light, vision. Their hearing isn’t too great, either,
and they have a reduced range when compared to humans. They would
have difficulty in detecting low- and high- pitched sounds. But they do have
a very keen sense of smell—a sense of smell that can detect carrion over
2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away.
●● Most of the smell, though, is not detected through the nostrils. Instead, they
use their yellow tongue to continually “taste” the air. The Komodo dragon
●● Did the Komodo dragon arrive as a small lizard and grow large as part of
the island effect? Or is it possible, as has been suggested by some, that
the dragon grew large as a result of a need to prey on the dwarf but still
large Stegodon elephants that were in the same environment? According
to these hypotheses, small monitor lizards get washed onto the islands—
perhaps on mats of vegetation, by floods, or even by tsunamis—and then
evolve into the large Komodo dragon that we know today.
●● We are currently in a relatively warm interval during the current ice age, the
last glacial advance of which ended about 12,000 years ago. During the
various glacial maxima, sea levels would fall, linking many of the current
islands in Indonesia, or at least reducing the amount of ocean between
them. At these times, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra
were part of a landmass called Sunda, while Australia and New Guinea
were part of a landmass called Sahul.
●● When the ice melted and sea levels rose again, the species that had
migrated to these islands were trapped. This led to an isolated evolution
of their fauna and flora and explains why this is one of the most biodiverse
places on the planet. In a biogeographical sense, this area is called
Wallacea, in honor of Alfred Wallace, a coauthor with Darwin on the first
paper describing evolution by natural selection.
Australian Megafauna
●● What is the status of the last surviving relic of these giant lizards? It is
estimated that the population hovers around 3000 individuals in the wild,
placing them in a “vulnerable” status.
●● Human interaction, though, has had a serious effect. The dragons have
suffered from loss of habitat and poaching of their prey. They have also
been deliberately poisoned, and some dragons have been captured,
presumably for personal collections or trophies.
Questions to consider:
1. How many new species have evolved on islands in isolation?
2. How many species of fossil animals may have been venomous?
Suggested Reading:
Fichman, An Elusive Victorian.
Long, Archer, Flannery, and Hand, Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and
New Guinea.
Molnar, Dragons in the Dust.
S
ome fossils are controversial. Other fossils challenge the way we
believed the story of life unfolded on our planet. And a few fossils
go beyond that, challenging the very foundations of our perceived
reality—our place on Earth. In this lecture, you will learn about one of those
fossil species and discover how it is at the center of both a scientific and
moral debate that is still raging today.
●● In 1705, a Dutch settler in the Hudson River valley near the village of
Claverack, New York, found a tooth. The tooth was then traded to a local
politician, who subsequently made it a gift for the governor of New York,
Lord Cornbury, who was convinced that this was the tooth of a giant—one
of the giants thought to have roamed Earth before the flood mentioned in
Genesis.
●● The tooth was sent to London and became known as incognitum, the
unknown species. In South Carolina other giant teeth started to turn up.
Slaves in that state noted that they looked very much like the teeth of
African elephants.
●● In addition, tusks and other bones started to be found in the Ohio River
valley—fossils that resembled the woolly mammoths recovered from
permafrost in Siberia, and as a result, incognitum would incorrectly get
grouped with them.
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the teeth. Those found in Ohio and Siberia had ridges, a bit like a running
shoe, designed for grazing grasses and the like.
●● The teeth of incognitum are very different. They have raised cones, which
reminded Cuvier of breasts. This creature clearly had a different diet than
the mammoths. It is from these breast-like cones that this creature got its
most common name: the mastodon. Cuvier soon started to realize that the
teeth and bones of these creatures, while resembling modern elephants,
were not the same species.
●● The general view at that time was that there was an unbroken chain of
creatures stretching back to their creation in the Garden of Eden. In addition,
when Cuvier was studying these troublesome teeth, the accepted date of
the creation of our planet was around 4004 B.C. The discovery of these
extinct beasts not only shook ideas of a still-intact creation, but also made
scholars start to question the perceived age of the Earth. Around 6000 years
didn’t appear to be enough time to accommodate all these fantastic animals.
●● Cuvier came to believe that most of the fossils he was studying were from
“older worlds” destroyed by some sort of catastrophe. He was convinced
that many of the fossils and geological formations he examined pointed to
the Earth progressing by a series of catastrophes that caused the extinction
of many species. These ideas were largely replaced by uniformitarianism,
the theory that geological features could be explained by present-day
slow processes, such as erosion and deposition of sediments.
●● Most of the fossils of mammoths and mastodons that were being found in
North America during the 1700s date to around 10,000 to 12,000 years B.P.
●● By about 10 million years ago, though, the king of all elephants would
evolve: Deinotherium, larger than a modern African elephant, some of
which weighed about 14.5 tons.
●● Mammoths evolved in Africa during the Pliocene and would enter Europe
by about 3 million years ago. A European species called the steppe
mammoth evolved in eastern Asia and, by around 1.5 million years ago,
would cross the Bering Strait across “Beringia” when sea levels were lower
than today. The Columbian mammoth would evolve from these pioneering
steppe mammoths and populate an area from the northern United States
to Costa Rica.
●● The Columbian mammoth was about 4 meters (13 feet) at the shoulder and
weighed up to 11 tons. Specimens of the Columbian mammoth are quite
well known, as many individuals were caught in natural traps.
●● Woolly mammoths were smaller than their Columbian cousins, about the
same size as an African elephant. They were covered by course hair,
probably thicker than that of the Columbian mammoth, and, because they
lived in more northerly regions, had small ears, probably an adaptation
to conserve heat. The characteristic fatty hump on the mammoths’ backs
may have been used as a reserve source of nutrients in the more extreme
northerly environments.
●● Benjamin Franklin figured out the true nature of the beast. He reasoned,
correctly, that mastodons’ tusks would have been an impediment for
catching prey and suggested, again correctly, that the cone-like teeth
would probably be an adaptation to grinding small branches of trees.
●● The American mastodon, or Mammut, had shorter legs and flatter, longer
skulls, and they were more heavily muscled than the mammoths they
coexisted with. Large males reached up to 9 feet 2 inches and weighed 5
tons. They also had tusks that were less curved.
●● They ranged across North America during the Pleistocene epoch, mostly
inhabiting cold spruce woodlands, browsing on trees. Remains of the
mastodon have been found frozen in Alaska, and from these the genome
of the creature has been sequenced, allowing us to place it fairly accurately
within the elephant family tree.
●● The mammoths and mastodons of North America did not exist in isolation.
Other giant creatures roamed North America, part of a now-extinct
Pleistocene megafauna.
Because we know that the Asian elephant is the closest living relative
of the mammoth and that it shares about 99% of the mammoth genome,
we could recognize the part that is not mammoth and swap it out with
parts of the genome that we have positively identified as mammoth. We
have the technology to snip off sections of Asian elephant DNA and
insert mammoth sections, but we are still a long way from reconstructing
a woolly mammoth.
Questions to consider:
1. How much of a role did our species have in the extinction of
mammoths?
2. Where should we place the dividing line between what is acceptable
and unacceptable in cloning?
Suggested Reading:
Lister and Bahn, Mammoths.
Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth.
M
yths and legends are a wonderful part of who we are. Some
myths are unique, but many share a common theme that is
repeated across many cultures. One of those common myths
is the existence of “little people.” This lecture will take you to the island of
Flores, part of the Lesser Sunda Islands in Indonesia. You will learn about
the paleontological secrets that Flores holds as well as the identity of
Homo floresiensis.
●● So, Flores was probably a good place to hunt for these earliest migrants
making their way across the East Indies.
173
bone and then about a year later a tooth. Then, on September 6, 2003,
one of the locally hired excavators, Benyamin Tarus, exposed the top of a
skull (LB1) at about 6 meters (around 20 feet) below the cave floor.
●● This was a small individual, about 3 feet 6 inches (1.06 meters) and
weighing about 66 pounds (30 kilograms). It looked like a female child,
until the teeth were examined: The jaw contained wisdom teeth that were
fully exposed and also demonstrated signs of wear. This was a tiny adult
about 30 years old, dating to geologically very recent times, at about
18,000 years ago.
●● The discovery generated a media storm, and very quickly these little
people were named “Flores Hobbits” by the media after the little people in
J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. Scientifically, they were named Homo floresiensis, a
member of our own genus and part of the taxonomic tribe called hominins,
comprising modern humans and their ancestors.
●● Many were unhappy with the idea of these fossils being a new species of
human. The head Indonesian anthropologist Teuku Jacob, after examining
the remains, declared that they resemble modern humans suffering from
a condition known as microcephaly. This is a rare neurological disorder
generally associated with dwarfism and characterized by people with very
●● Does this explain the presence of stone tools in the cave and evidence
for the use of fire? Could it also explain the butchered remains of extinct
pygmy elephants called Stegodon florensis insularis? This animal was
about the size of a cow but would still be a challenge for an individual
shorter than 4 feet. Could this imply group hunting, a complex social
structure requiring advanced cognition and perhaps speech?
Homo floresiensis
●● Supposing that this is a real human ancestor, a close relative but not a
member of Homo sapiens, where does Homo floresiensis fit into our story?
●● It is thought that Homo sapiens likely evolved from a group of Homo erectus
in Africa about 200,000 years ago and spread out from there, replacing
Homo erectus and other human species, such as the Neanderthals, and
ultimately becoming the only living species of human on Earth.
●● If Homo floresiensis did not evolve from Homo sapiens, then from whom
in our family tree did they evolve? The most obvious candidate would be
Homo erectus, our first really human-looking ancestor and the only other
human ancestor we have evidence of in Indonesia. But how does a large
●● Dr. Matt Tocheri of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program notes that
there are several features in modern human and Neanderthal wrists
that are quite different from the wrist structure of great apes and earlier
hominins. It would appear, though, that the structure of the wrist of the LB1
fossil shares much more in common with these earlier hominins and the
great apes than it does us.
●● So, this research confirms the early status of Homo floresiensis. In fact,
some have wondered if Homo floresiensis could be descended from even
●● The problem with this is that unlike Homo erectus, the australopithecines
and Homo habilis are not known out of Africa. It is conceivable, however,
that the “Saharan pump”—an opening up of a grassland corridor along the
eastern Mediterranean due to changing environmental conditions—could
have allowed for their migration just as it did for Homo erectus, which
possibly reached Java by about 1.5 million years ago. If this is the case,
Homo floresiensis may represent some of our earliest human wanderers.
Perhaps we will find their fossils in the future.
●● This is a very volcanically active part of the world. The volcanoes in Indonesia
are dangerous, very different from the generally benign volcanic eruptions
we see on Hawaii. The volcanoes in Indonesia are explosive and capable
of generating pyroclastic flows, hot flows of gas and rock that can reach
speeds of 700 kilometers per hour (450 miles per hour) and temperatures
of 1000° Celsius (1830° Fahrenheit). They can also be responsible for lahars,
a volcanic debris flow composed of a slurry of pyroclastic material and
various materials flowing with the consistency of wet concrete.
●● It is possible that they survived only to be wiped out by the modern people
of Flores. Unfortunately, the idea that they coexisted with modern humans
for an extended period of time may have recently revived a blow.
●● Even so, it would be nice to think that they are still furtively slipping
through the forests of Indonesia. Between 2005 and 2009, a camera-
trapping project was funded by the National Geographic Society in the
hope of snapping a shot of the mysterious creature in the woods—without
success.
Questions to consider:
1. How much of our genome is the result of species interbreeding?
2. As far as we know, are we the last remaining member of our genus?
Are we an endangered genus?
Suggested Reading:
Stringer, Lone Survivors.
Tattersall, Masters of the Planet.
F
or many years, we had a brutish vision of Neanderthals. The species
was regarded as extremely primitive when compared to Homo
sapiens and not very closely related to us at all. Today, our overall
picture of Neanderthals is a rather short, stocky, barrel-chested, and
powerfully built people. They had heavier faces than Homo sapiens but
were a far cry from the brutal shambling ape that was once envisioned.
In this lecture, you will learn who the Neanderthals were—specifically,
whether they were a species in their own right or just a thick-skulled variety
of Homo sapiens.
●● Did Neanderthals just look like humans, or did they actually demonstrate
human intelligence and complex social structures? If you consider pure
brain size, Neanderthals actually have us beat. The average cranial
capacity of Homo sapiens is 1400 cubic centimeters, while the capacity of
Homo neanderthalensis is around 1600 cubic centimeters.
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●● This is a difficult thing to prove, but Neanderthal DNA may help us. We
know that on chromosome 7 in the human genome there is a gene called
FOXP2 that is required for the development of speech and language,
controlling the development of various features in the brain, heart, lungs,
and gut. Mutations in this gene can cause speech and language disorders.
●● There are only 2 differences in the amino acid code of the FOXP2 gene
between humans and chimps, and between Neanderthals and humans
there is no difference. Does this suggest that they inherited the gene from
a common ancestor even further back in time? If this is the case, could
we also infer that Neanderthals were equipped with all the language
production capacity that we humans have?
●● Neanderthals were adept at making sharp flakes of stone for a wide variety
purposes, including cutting and scraping. Neanderthal tools have often
been thought of as primitive when compared to those produced by Homo
sapiens, but they are still very versatile and efficient.
●● For a long time, one of the features of Homo sapiens that was regarded as
being unique and distinct was the production of art. Art illustrates an ability
to conceptualize—to represent the world you see, or perhaps don’t see,
what is locked in your imagination.
●● For a long time, it was thought that Neanderthals did not exhibit artistic
abilities, but a geometric crosshatch pattern found at the back of a cave
in Gibraltar in 2012 may change that. These symbols are thought to be
around 39,000 years old and were discovered below an undisturbed layer
●● Over time, mtDNA, like nuclear DNA, will undergo random mutations—
slight errors when the DNA is copied from one generation to
another. We can use these differences between mtDNA in
different people and estimate the rate of mutation to determine
how far back in time they once shared a common ancestor. We
can also find out how long since they shared that ancestor that
they have been traveling along their own particular branch of
the ancestry road.
●● There had been intriguing fossil finds, though, that suggested some
interbreeding had occurred. Had there been inbreeding despite the
antiquity of the last common ancestor of the 2 species? To answer this, we
would have to find some way to read the nuclear DNA of Neanderthals, the
blueprint of the organism held in the cell’s nucleus. This was the quest for
the Neanderthal genome.
●● This is something that we have only just recently achieved for our own
species in the Human Genome Project, an international effort to read our
own human blueprint. The human genome project was initiated in 1990
and completed in April of 2003.
●● Not everyone has the same part of the genome, but in total it is thought that
around 30 to 40% of the Neanderthal genome is floating around in the human
population. This indicates that there was not one Neanderthal ancestor, but
there must be an entire history of Neanderthal-human interactions.
●● This is one possible picture of our messy genome that was published by
Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London in Nature in 2012.
Humans and Neanderthals diverged from a common heidelbergensis
ancestor, with Neanderthals generating another ancient human group,
the Denisovans. Each of these forms included an archaic flow back into
the Homo sapiens population, contributing in varying degrees some small
parts of the modern human genome.
●● It has been suggested that early modern humans during this period would
have had more widespread social networks. This would allow them to
acquire resources over a greater area. Neanderthals in this model become
increasingly isolated and starved of resources. They finally become extinct
at about 41,000 to 39,000 B.P., at the start of a very cold snap.
Questions to consider:
1. How do we define consciousness, and is it only a trait that evolved in
Homo sapiens?
2. Was it inevitable that Homo sapiens would become the only member
of our genus on Earth? Is it possible that different circumstances could
have seen the Homo neanderthalensis rise to dominance?
I
n this final lecture, you will consider what the future holds for our
species and what role paleontology plays in this inquiry. The future of
paleontology is perhaps universal. With new exoplanets being found
around stars every year, who knows where a future fossil hunter may tread.
And the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is a hotbed of
cutting-edge research, charting the history of the Earth system through
time. It is in places like this, and others around the world, that the keys to
the past, present, and future will be cast—and, with them, perhaps a more
secure future for us all.
●● The likely causes of change to the Earth system in the future are difficult to
predict. The continents will continue to move about our planet as they have
for billions of years. Reconstructions like those of Christopher Scotese from
the University of Texas at Arlington predict that a new supercontinent will
form in about 1/4 of a billion years from now, part of a supercontinent cycle.
●● But printed on the slow movements of the continents are rapid events.
Consider Yellowstone, a volcano that is so vast that it is difficult to
appreciate that it is actually a volcano from the ground. Yellowstone is a
caldera that measures 60 by 32 kilometers that last erupted massively
about 640,000 years ago. Yellowstone is “breathing,” with the caldera floor
rising and falling probably in response to the developing magma chamber
below. A major eruption at Yellowstone would likely be catastrophic for
human civilization, but even with the park’s ups and downs, it is thought it is
unlikely to erupt any time soon.
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●● Other sudden events can strike from the skies rather than rising from the
depths. Paleontologists and geologists have been studying the violent end
of the Mesozoic biosphere 66 million years ago for decades. The general
consensus is that the Earth was hit by a 10-kilometer-diameter object that
caused such catastrophic environmental change that it drove the Mesozoic
biosphere, including the dinosaurs, into extinction.
●● Recently, we have been reminded that impacts from space, like major
volcanic events, are still a very reasonable part of our collective future. On
February 15, 2013, at around 9:20 am, a bright light was seen streaking
above the skies of Russia. The event was captured by closed-circuit
television and dashboard cameras all over the southern Ural region.
●● The event damaged more than 7000 buildings in 6 cities. About 1500
people received injuries, mostly from broken glass, that required medical
treatment.
●● If this object had hit the ground, it would have generated a substantial
crater and probably more damage and potential fatalities—not a mass-
extinction-level event, but it certainly shows that the days of impacts from
space, just like supervolcanoes, are far from over.
●● With all these changes to the Earth system, there has been a call by
some geologists and paleontologists for the erection of a new geological
period, the Anthropocene, to reflect these changing times. In 2008, the
International Commission on Stratigraphy received a proposal to make the
Anthropocene a unit of the geological timescale.
●● There is some debate as to when and how the actual boundary will be
drawn. Some favor an “early” boundary around the Neolithic revolution,
which saw the transition of many human lifestyles from hunting and
gathering to one of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. This, though, kind
of places it in conflict with a preexisting period, the Holocene, which begins
about 11,700 B.P. and continues to the present day.
●● Our understanding of the rates and extent of the big 5 mass extinctions
are continually being refined and updated as new techniques, geological
sections, and fossils come to light. A fine example of this is the end-
Permian extinction, which, until relatively recently, was a mystery. Now we
are gaining insights into the triggers, cascade of ensuing events, timing,
and extent of this “mother of all extinctions.”
●● The results they generated suggest that current extinction rates may be
100 times higher than the assumed, probably artificially high, background
rate. With their calculated extinction rate, we should have seen around 9
vertebrate extinctions since 1900, but 468 more documented vertebrate
extinctions have been recorded, including 69 mammals, 80 birds, 24 reptiles,
146 amphibians, and 158 fish. And we may be unaware of other species going
extinct because they have vanished before we could find them.
●● If these estimates are correct, then these are disturbing trends. The
study claims, though, that with conservation and proper environmental
management, these trends could be reversed. Paleontology has a vital
role to play in these efforts. It speaks to the time and pattern and recovery
of ecosystems after extinction and also to the minimum level of biodiversity
required to maintain a healthy biosphere. It also provides a warning
regarding how rapidly the biosphere can be plunged into crisis.
Questions to consider:
1. Has technology made Homo sapiens immune to mass extinctions?
2. Are we still evolving?
Suggested Reading:
D’Arcy Wood, Tambora.
Keller and DeVecchio, Natural Hazards.
Beerling, David. The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. An interesting account of how plants
have influenced the evolution of the Earth system.
Benton, Michael J., and David A. T. Harper. Introduction to Paleobiology and the
Fossil Record. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. A standard text in paleontology
that includes useful information on the processes of fossilization and the history
of paleontology.
Conway-Morris, Simon. The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the
Rise of Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.An interesting overview
195
of the discovery, research, and fossils found in the Burgess Shale, including the
arthropods.
D’Arcy Wood, Gillen. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. A description of the eruption of
Mount Tambora in 1815 and the consequences it had for the entire planet.
Emling, Shelley. The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman
Whose Discoveries Changed the World. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011. A
detailed account of the life, times, and scientific contributions of Mary Anning.
Erwin, Douglas. Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years
Ago. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. An overview of how Earth
suffered the greatest biological crisis in its history at the end of the Permian.
Fortey, Richard. Earth: An Intimate History. New York: Vintage, 2005. A very
readable overview of Earth history.
Goulson, Dave. A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees. New York:
Picador, 2013. An interesting read about one of today’s common flower visitors,
the bumblebee.
Keary, Philip, Keith A. Klepeis, and Frederick J. Vine. Global Tectonics. Hoboken:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. A more advanced text on plate tectonic theory.
Keller, Edward A., and Duane E. DeVecchio. Natural Hazards: Earth’s Processes
as Hazards, Disasters, and Catastrophes. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson,
2015. A text covering the various natural disasters facing our planet today and
into the future.
Knell, Simon J. The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont
Animal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. This book investigates
the discovery of the animal that was ultimately found to be responsible for
conodont microfossils.
Knoll, Andrew. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. An investigation into the
biosphere’s origins and evolution up to the Cambrian explosion of multicellular
life.
Bibliography 197
Lanham, Url. The Bone Hunters: The Heroic Age of Paleontology in the
American West. New York: Dover Publications, 2011. A review of the early years
of dinosaur hunting in North America.
Levin, Harold L., and David T. King Jr. The Earth Through Time. Hoboken: Wiley,
2016. A good introduction to some of the basics of geology and geological
time.
Lister, Adrian, and Paul Bahn. Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007. A review of mammoths and mastodons,
their paleobiology, and their extinction.
Long, John A., Michael Archer, Timothy Flannery, and Suzanne Hand.
Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea: One Hundred Million Years
of Evolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. A review of the
wonderful prehistoric mammals of Australia.
Molnar, Ralph E. Dragons in the Dust: The Paleobiology of the Giant Monitor
Lizard Megalania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. A portrait of the
Komodo dragon’s larger Australian cousin.
Pääbo, Svante. Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. New York: Basic
Books, 2014. An account of how the Neanderthal genome was sequenced.
Seilacher, Adolf. Trace Fossil Analysis. New York: Springer, 2007. A detailed
review of the interpretation and use of trace fossils.
Stringer, Chris. Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth.
New York: Times Books, 2012. An interesting view on the origins of our species.
Sues, Hans-Dieter, and Nicholas C. Fraser. Triassic Life on Land: The Great
Transition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. A detailed review (aimed
at professionals and students of paleontology) of life on land during the Triassic
period.
Tattersall, Ian. Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012. A more general review of human evolution.
Thompson, Ida. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fossils.
New York: Knopf, 1982. A useful guide to fossils you might find in North America.
Bibliography 199
Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the
Birth of Modern Geology. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. An excellent book
that details the many trials and tribulations of William Smith and his use of fossils
as timepieces.
Internet Resources
Paleogeographic and Tectonic History of Western North America. http://
cpgeosystems.com/wnampalgeog.html. Maps detailing the evolution of western
North America, starting 280 million years ago, by Professor Ron Blakey.
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