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Books > Earth & environment > Earth sciences > Palaeontology
Foraminiferal Micropaleontology for Understanding Earth's History
incorporates new findings on taxonomy, classification and
biostratigraphy of foraminifera. Foraminifera offer the best
geochemical proxies for paleoclimate and paleoenvironment
interpretation. The study of foraminifera was promoted by oil
exploration due to its exceptional use in subsurface stratigraphy.
A rapid technological development in the past 20 years in the field
of imaging microfossils and in geochemical microanalysis have added
novel information about foraminifera. Foraminiferal
Micropaleontology for Understanding Earth's History builds an
understanding of biology, morphology and classification of
foraminifera for its varied applications. In the past two decades,
a phenomenal growth has occurred in geochemical proxies in shells
of foraminifera, and as a result, crucial information about past
climate of the earth is achieved. Foraminifera is the most
extensively used marine microfossils in deep-time reconstruction of
the earth history. Its key applications are in paleoenvironment and
paleoclimate interpretation, paleoceanography, and biostratigraphy
to continuously improve the Geologic Time Scale.
A classic work from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
describing the mosasaurs, a group of large predatory marine lizards
of the Mesozoic Mosasaurs have captured the imagination of readers
everywhere interested in prehistoric life, and they remain a focus
of paleontological study to this day. This edition of Dale
Russell's Systematics and Morphology of American Mosasaurs presents
the complete, classic text, generously illustrated with more than
one hundred drawings and photographs, and includes a new foreword
by vertebrate paleontologist Jacques A. Gauthier (Yale University
and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History). Distributed for the
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
'Fascinating and entertaining. If you read one book on human
origins, this should be it' Ian Morris, author of Why the West
Rules - For Now 'The who, what, where, when and how of human
evolution, from one of the world's experts on the dating of
prehistoric fossils' Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Fall of
the Dinosaurs 50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of
human in the world. There were at least four others, including the
Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans.
At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was
Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains
the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon
dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these
discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our
predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived,
but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This
is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of
characters. 'The application of new genetic science to pre-history
is analogous to how the telescope transformed astronomy. Tom Higham
brings us to the frontier of recent discoveries with a book that is
both gripping and fun' Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion
'This exciting book shows that we now have a revolutionary new tool
for reconstructing the human past: DNA from minute pieces of tooth
and bone, and even from the dirt on the floor of caves' David
Abulafia, author of The Boundless Sea 'The remarkable new science
of palaeoanthropology, from lab bench to trench' Rebecca Wragg
Sykes, author of Kindred 'Higham's thrilling account makes readers
feel as if they were participating themselves in the extraordinary
series of events that in the last few years has revealed our
long-lost cousins' David Reich, author of Who We Are and How We Got
Here 'A brilliant distillation of the ideas and discoveries
revolutionising our understanding of human evolution' Chris Gosden,
author of The History of Magic
The Paleobiological Revolution chronicles the incredible ascendance
of the once-maligned science of paleontology to the vanguard of a
field. With the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s
and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and
Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen
Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became
embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate
discipline central to evolutionary studies. Pairing contributions
from some of the leading actors of the transformation with
overviews from historians and philosophers of science, the essays
here capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the
discipline. In so doing, David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse harness
the energy of the past to call for further study of the conceptual
development of modern paleobiology.
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